E 

449 


Ifl?    330 


ff* 


LEGAL  ABGUMEIT 


BEFORE    TH£ 


SUPREME  COURT  OF  THE  STATE  OF  NEW  JERSEY, 

% 

®erm,  1845,  at  Sratton, 


FOR  THE  DELIVERANCE  OF 


PERSONS    FROM    BONDAGE 


BY    ALVAN  [STEWART,    ESQ., 

COUNBKLLOR    AT    LAW. 


NEW  YORK: 

FINCH    &     WEED,     118     NASSAU    STREET. 

1845. 


v,- 


LEGAL  ARGUMENT 


BEFORE   TUB 


SUPREME  COURT  OF  THE  STATE  OF  NEW  JERSEY, 


tl;e  JElag  form,  1845,  at  Stouten, 


FOR  THE  DELIVERANCE  OF 


POUR  THOUSAND  PERSONS  FROM  BONDAGE. 


BY    ALVAN    STEWART,    ESQ., 

COUNSELLOR  AT  LAW* 


NEW  YORK: 

FINCH    &    WEED,    118    NASSAU   STREET. 

1845, 


8.    W.    BENEDICT, 
Stereotype?  and  Printer    10  Spruce  Street. 


PREFACE. 


THE  public  will  not  expect  a  preface  to  a  disquisition  on  Constitutional 
Law,  which  can  go  far  to  encourage  them,  in  the  perusal  of  a  legal  argu 
ment  ;  but  when  that  public  are  informed  that  the  argument  was  not  to 
change  the  title  to  a  farm,  or  test  the  Constitutionality  df  a  bank  charter,  but 
that  it  was  made  for  the  deliverance  of  four  thousand  human  beings  from 
bondage,  and  to  overthrow  the  Institution  of  Slavery  in  the  State  of  New 
Jersey,  further  attempts  at  apology  or  to  propitiate  then:  kind  perusal, 
would  seem  unnecessary. 

Several  distinguished  gentlemen  of  the  bar  have  been  so  kind  as  to 
wish  to  see  this  argument  in  a  more  perfect  form  than  could  be  expected 
from  the  desultory  notes  of  a  reporter,  which  only  glanced  at  some  of  the 
most  important  topics  which  formed  the  basis  of  discussion ;  to  meet 
which  desire,  and  contribute  a  single  mite  to  the  deliverance  of  my  coun 
trymen  from  Slavery,  it  is  hoped,  will  insure  the  reading  of  the  following 

pages. 

A.  S. 
N*c  York,  June,  1845. 


/Of 


M279783 


SLAVERY  IN  NEW  JERSEY. 


SUPREME  COURT  OF  NEW  JERSEY 


THE  STATE, 

vs.  >      Writ  of  Habeas  Corpus. 

EDWARD  VAN  BUREN. 

THE  STATE, 

vs.  Writ  of  Habeas  Corpus, 

JOHN  A.  POST. 


Brfon  H)t  Justices  of  %  Supreme  dourt  of  JTero 

THE  HONORABLE  CHIEF  JUSTICE  HORNBLOWER, 
And  Judges  Associated,  NEVIUS,  CARPENTER  and  RANDOLPH. 

E.  P.  PALMER,  Esq.,  Petitioner  for  the  Slave  and  Apprentice. 

ALVAN  STEWART,  Esq.,  of  the  State  of  New  York,  Counsellor  and  Advo 
cate  for  the  slave  and  apprentice,  admitted  to  argue  these  causes  by  the 
courtesy  of  the  Court. 

A.  0.  ZABRISKIE,  Esq.,  of  New  Jersey,  Counsel  for  VAN  BUREN. 
JOSEPH  P.  BRADLEY,  of  Newark,  Counsel  for  JOHN  A.  POST. 

These  causes  were  argued  before  the  Hon.  Justices  of  the  Supreme 
Court,  at  the  Capitol  in  Trenton,  on  the  21st  and  22d  day  of  May,  1845. 
MR.  STEWART  occupied  about  eleven  hours,  and  the  defendant's  counsel 
five  hours,  during  two  days  and  an  evening. 

The  argument  in  these  two  causes,  in  behalf  of  Mary  Tebout,  held,  in 
the  first  case,  as  property,  until  twenty-one  years  of  age,  her  mother  be 
ing  a  slave,  and  she  being  19  years  of  age  ;  and  in  the  second  case,  Wil 
liam,  a  colored  man,  claimed  by  JOHN  A.  POST  as  a  slave  for  life,  being 
about  sixty  years  of  age.  Returns  to  the  Writs  of  Habeas  Corpus  were 
duly  made  on  Wednesday,  the  21st  of  May,  1845,  in  these  causes  respect 
ively,  before  the  Justices  aforesaid.  These  writs  had  been  granted  on  a 
previous  day,  on  motion  of  ALVAN  STEWART,  Esq.,  in  open  Court. 

The  object  of  those  writs  was  to  test  the  institution  of  slavery  in  the 
State  of  New  Jersey,  which  the  Counsel  for  the  slave  and  apprentice  con 
tended  was  abolished,  by  the  first  section  of  the  Bill  of  Rights,  in  the 
new  Constitution  of  this  State,  which  went  into  operation  the  2d  Sep-. 


6 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY. 


tember,  1844.  The  defendant  VAN  BUREN,  by  his  Counsel,  returned  to 
said  writ,  that  he  held  the  said  Mary  Tebout,  by  means  of  several  inter- 
mediate  conveyances,  from  a  person  who  owned  the  mother  of  said 
Mary ;  the  said  mother  being  a  slave  for  life,  and  that  the  said  Edward 
claimed  to  hold  the  said  Mary,  as  his  property,  until  she  was  twenty-one 
years  of  age,  she  now  being  nineteen  years  old,  by  virtue  of  a  Statute, 
passed  for  the  gradual  abolition  of  slavery,  in  February,  1820,  by  which 
all  slaves  born  previous  to  the  fourth  July,  1804,  were  slaves  for  life,  and 
all  children  born  of  said  slaves  after  1804,  were  declared  free,  but  to  be 
held  by  the  owners  of  their  mothers  as  apprentices  were ;  who  were 
bound  out  by  the  overseers  of  the  poor,  males  till  twenty -five  years  of  age, 
and  females  until  twenty-one.  The  said  male  until  twenty-five,  and 
female  until  twenty-one,  were  held  by  the  owners,  their  administrators 
and  assigns,  as  property,  or  as  other  slaves  are,  until  their  time  was  out. 

The  return  in  the  case  of  JOHN  A.  POST  was  the  same  in  substance, 
that  he  held  the  said  William,  a  colored  man,  as  a  slave  by  virtue  of  the 
law  aforesaid,  being  born  before  1804.  To  these  returns  general 
demurrers  were  put  in,  alleging  the  institution  of  slavery  was  abolished, 
arid  that  the  returns  did  not  state  sufficient  authority  to  authorize  the 
defendants  to  hold  said  persons  To  which  there  was  a  joinder  in 
demurrer. 

Both  of  these  causes  were  argued  together,  depending  on  the  same 
laws  for  their  support,  and  for  the  purpose  of  obtaining  a  judicial  deci 
sion,  overthrowing  the  system  of  slavery  in  New  Jersey,  in  all  its  parts. 
The  following  pages  are  intended  to  be  the  substance  of  the  argument 
and  reply  of  ALVAN  STEWART,  Esq.,  of  New  York,  who  appeared  for  the 
slave  and  servant,  as  their  Counsel. 

The  first  article  of  the  new  Constitution  of  New  Jersey,  of  September, 
1844,  is  entitled  "  RIGHTS  AND  PRIVILEGES." 

"  All  men  are  by  nature  free  and  independent,  and  have  certain  natural 
and  unalienable  rights,  among  which  are  those  of  enjoying  and  defend 
ing  life  and  liberty,  acquiring,  possessing  and  protecting  property,  and  of 
pursuing  and  obtaining  safety  and  happiness." 

It  was  supposed  there  were  from  seven  hundred  to  one  thousand  slaves, 
and  from  twenty-five  hundred  to  three  thousand  servants  or  more,  whose 
liberties  were  involved  in  the  argument  and  decision  of  these  causes,  as 
well  as  the  institution  itself. 

ALVAN  STEWART,  Esq.,  arose  and  invoked,  as  he  said,  the  kind  conside 
ration  of  this  Court,  while  he  endeavored  to  break  into  a  new,  and  almost 
uncultivated  region,  to  explore  and  investigate  the  long  neglected  rights 
of  man  to  his  own  body  and  soul.  The  Courts  of  our  country  had  sounded 
the  depths  of  human  learning,  and  all  the  vast  stores  of  history,  and  the 
remains  of  antiquity  had  been  overhauled,  sifted  and  analyzed,  with 
metaphysical  sagacity,  to  determine  with  judicial  accuracy,  all  the  rights 
which  men  had  to  property,  lands  and  tenements,  corporeal  and  incorpo 
real.  Everything  in  the  shape  of  human  acquisition  had  been  again  and 
again  labored  and  belabored  by  the  highest  talents  of  the  land,  until  learning 
and  genius  could  do  no  more,  to  add  to  man's  possessions ;  while  the  great 
right  of  man  to  himself,  while  innocent  self -ownership,  under  all  circum 
stances,  is  a  great  question,  which  has  rather  been  grazed  than  lifted  up, 
shunned  than  embraced,  or  duly  considered,  in  all  its  mighty  amplitude, 
and  its  solemn  importance ;  and  then  only  at  distant  periods  of  time,  and 
under  the  greatest  disadvantage  in  point  of  time,  place,  position  and  cir 
cumstance.  The  controversies  about  lands  and  estates,  and  the  personal 
rights  of  freemen,  with  all  the  subtle  ramifications  of  the  schoolmen,  of 
various  legal  questions  of  our  age,  have  been  pressing  the  lughest  ju<li- 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  7 

cial  forums  of  our  land  for  decision,  and  constitute  much  of  the  drudgery 
of  counsel,  and  labor  of  the  judges.  A  modern  legal  opinion  of  counsel 
or  judge  is,  that  it  is  his  opinion  that  he  has  clearly  discovered  what  was 
the  opinion  of  Chief  Justice  Mansfield,  or  Lord  Thurlow,  on  this  question, 
when  Lord  M.,  or  Lord  T.  saw  fit  to  express  an  opinion  on  this  subject. 

Considering  the  mighty  questions  of  human  liberty  placed  under  the 
control  of  twenty-seven  State  Constitutions,  their  laws,  and  the  Federal 
Constitution  and  acts  of  Congress,  and  the  ten  thousand  forms  in  which 
human  liberty  may  be  abused,  from  the  most  horrible  slavery,  to  the 
slightest  invasion  of  a  trespass ;  it  seems  passing  belief,  to  be  told,  there 
is  not  one  volume  of  reports,  arguments  and  decisions,  touching  the  great 
inalienable  rights  of  man,  invaded  as  they  are,  by  communities,  states 
and  individuals,  as  a  regular  commerce  carried  on  in  crushed  and  violated 
human  rights,  assaulted  in  every  direction,  overthrown,  trodden  under 
foot  as  they  are,  at  every  step  and  angle  of  passing  life.  The  attention  of 
our  countrymen  seems  to  have  been  turned  to  the  contingencies  and 
appurtenances  of  our  race,  rather  than  to  man,  and  the  elevation  of  the 
race  itself.  Congress  has  shown  more  anxiety  to  protect  the  hats,  the 
boots,  and  the  coats  which  men  wear,  than  the  heads  they  cover,  the 
bodies  they  surround,  and  the  feet  they  enclose.  That  grave  assembly 
can  dispute  from  Christmas  to  dog-days,  about  the  Tariff,  Protection,  Free 
Trade  and  Revenue,  while  a  petition  to  abolish  slavery  in  the  District  of 
Columbia,  to  give  a  man  to  himself,  a  wife  to  a  husband,  and  children  to 
their  parents,  is  received  with  profound  astonishment  as  a  moral  anomaly, 
and  when  the  house  has  recovered  from  its  surprise,  the  petition  being 
so  completely  at  right  angles  with  the  course  of  a  republican  Con 
gress,  that  unread,  imprinted,  undebated,  and  undecided,  it  is  ordered  to 
lie  upon  the  table,  until  the  clerk  removes  it  to  its  sepulchral  silence  in 
one  corner  of  the  Capitol,  to  rest  with  the  other  entombed  memorials  of 
a  nation's  dishonored  humanity. 

Nothing  has  been  held  so  cheap  as  our  common  humanity,  on  a 
national  average.  If  every  man  had  his  aliquot  proportion  of  the 
injustice  done  in  this  land,  by  law  and  violence,  the  present  freemen  of 
the  northern  section  would  many  of  them  commit  suicide  in  self-defence, 
and  would  court  the  liberties  awarded  by  Ali  Pasha  of  Egypt  to  his  sub 
jects.  Long  ere  this,  we  should  have  tested,  in  behalf  of  our  bleeding 
and  crushed  American  brothers  of  every  hue  and  complexion,  every  new 
Constitution,  custom,  or  practice,  by  which  inhumanity  was  supposed  to 
be  upheld,  the  injustice  and  cruelty  they  contained,  emblazoned  before  the 
great  tribunal  of  mankind  for  condemnation  ;  and  the  good  and  available 
power  they  possessed,  for  the  relief,  deliverance  and  elevation  of 
oppressed  men,  permitted  to  shine  forth  from  under  the  cloud,  for  the  re 
freshment  of  the  human  race. 

Yet  these  laws  and  constitutions  should  have  long  ere  this  felt  the 
weight  of  judicial  pressure,  and  their  good  or  evil  been  made  prominent  to 
the  men  of  America,  and  the  breadth  ami  depth  of  the  stream  of  national 
justice  ascertained,  so  that  we  might  know  the  exact  distance  between 
our  self-glorifications,  or  our  pompous  anniversaries,  and  the  pretended 
magnitude  of  our  personal  liberties,  as  compared  with  the  stern  and 
inexorable  mandates  of  judicial  decrees;  or  what  was  the  difference 
between  an  abstract  dogma  of  liberty,  and  a  practical  decision  of  tyranny 

Alas  !  said  MR.  S.,  how  vast  the  distance  between  an  abstraction  and  a 
practicality  !  Oh !  when,  said  MR.  S.,  shall  we  see  that  glorious  day,  when 
the  lion  and  the  lamb  shall  lie  down  together  ?  that  day  when  the  law, 
with  its  mercy,  shall  be  extended  to  all,  when  none  shall  be  so  powerful 
as  to  override  its  injunctions,  none  so  low  as  to  fall  beneath  its  merciful 
protection,  defending  all  in  their  possessions ;  the  rich  man  in  his  castle, 


8  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

the  poor  man  in  his  liberty,  and  the  value  of  his  labor,  whether  in  the 
wilderness,  or  the  city,  on  the  highway  or  in  the  closet ;  let  this  law  of 
liberty  brace  the  strong  man  on  his  journey,  and  its  precious  breathings 
fill  the  lungs  of  the  infant  in  the  cradle. 

Oh  !  for  the  glorious  day  when  we  shall  have  freedom  for  all,  wage* 
for  labor,  education  for  all,  mercy  to  all,  justice  for  all,  and  God's  religion 
in  all !  MR.  S.  said  it  was  a  horrid  thought,  that  in  the  19th  century,  there 
should  be  found  educated  men,  who  were  so  weak,  or  so  ignorant,  as  to 
suppose  the  title  to  the  great  inalienable  God-given  rights  of  life,  liberty, 
and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  depended  upon  the  complexion  of  a  human 
being,  whether  white,  black,  brown,  red,  or  in  combinations  of  these, 
with  curled  or  long  hair,  thick  or  thin  lips;  the  body  is  the  casket,  the 
soul,  the  immortal  mind  is  the  jewel.  The  jewels  are  homogeneous,  the 
caskets  may  be  infinitely  diversified.  To  deny  the  existence  of  the  jewel, 
from  the  caskets  being  more  or  less  plain  than  some  other  we  have  seen 
(when  we  know  the  jewel  is  within),  is  not  more  absurd  than  to  make  a 
man's  right  to  liberty  depend  upon  the  color  of  his  skin.  But,  said  MR.  S., 
such  are  the  raw  material  of  apologies  for  gross  wickedness,  and  the  vile- 
ness  of  the  material  is  never  improved  by  its  manufacture.  The  raw 
material,  its  manufacture,  the  manufacturer,  and  the  consumer  of  such 
strange  productions,  ought  to  be  bottled  and  hermetically  sealed,  where 
they  might  be  seen  through  a  glass  case  as  certain  lusus  natura,  or  as.  a 
calf  with  two  tails  and  no  head  are  seen  in  some  of  our  museums. 

In  order,  said  MR.  S.,  to  understand  the  blessings  which  the  new  consti 
tution  of  this  State  confers  on  the  subject  of  liberty,  it  may  not  be  amiss 
to  look,  for  a  few  moments,  at  the  past  ages  of  the  world,  on  the  subject 
of  slavery,  and  see  how  the  men  of  antiquity  saw  and  treated  this  ter 
rible  perversion  of  human  rights.  The  ancient  world,  before  the  advent 
of  our  blessed  Saviour,  was  filled  with  this  awful  crime.  All  pagan  lands 
abounded  with  idolatry  and  slavery.  But  the  glorious  new  religion, 
wherever  it  made  a  lodgment,  amidst  cruel  scourgings,  the  faggot  and 
the  flame,  the  block  and  the  cross,  the  dungeon  and  the  gibbet,  obtained 
the  ascendency ;  and  this  dreadful  institution  fell  before  the  mercy  of  the 
cross.  From  the  conversion  of  Constantine  in  the  4th  Century,  until 
the  12th,  Christianity  fought  her  victorious  battle  with  slavery,  and  came 
off  conqueror  and  drove  it  from  the  entire  regions  of  continental  Europe, 
or  wherever  Christianity  obtained  a  foot-hold  throughout  Christendom. 
To  be  sure,  said  MR.  S.,  there  existed,  owing  to  the  Feudal  Law,  a  sort  of 
serfdom,  in  some  countries,  which  was  different  in  appellation  and  cha 
racter  from  the  chattel-hood  of  slavery.  Time  fails,  said  MR.  S.,  to  tell 
how  the  various  devices  of  Pope,  Pontiff,  Bishops,  ecclesiastical  councils, 
decrees  of  councils,  of  kings,  diets  and  parliaments,  accomplished  during 
•what  is  called  the  dark  ages — this  most  glorious  work. 

Said  MR.  S.,  but  the  ever-memorable  year  of  1492  came  for  ever  to  be 
reckoned  the  most  wonderful  in  the  history  of  our  race  since  our  Saviour 
was  born, — a  new  world  was  discovered  by  Christopher  Columbus,  the 
grandest  man  of  his  race. 

The  human  passions  burst  into  a  mighty  name,  fed  by  the  accursed 
thirst  of  gold,  discovery,  and  conquest.  The  peaceable  and  inoffensive 
red  man  of  the  islands  of  the  Antilles  was  forced  as  slaves  to  do  work  in 
the  fields  and  iu  the  mines  ;  and  that  age  of  innocent  red  men,  a  whole 
generation  of  which  found  that  mercy  in  death,  which  their  Spanish  con 
querors  denied  them.  The  good  Las  Casas,  moved  by  a  considerate  sympa 
thy  for  the  red  man,  absurdly  recommended  to  his  prince  and  country,  to 
repeal  slavery  as  to  the  red  man  who  could  not  endure  its  cruelty,  and  in 
lieu,  abduct  and  kidnap  laborers  from  the  burning  tropics  of  Africa ;  and 
from  1520  this  dreadful  wound  was  opened  in  the  side  of  Africa, 


SLAVERY    IN  NEW    JERSEY.  9 

which  has  continued  from  year  to  year,  and  from  century  to  century,  to 
flow  on  without  intermission,  until  this  very  hour.  For  more  than  300 
years  has  Africa  been  despoiled  of  her  people  by  the  kidnappers  from  the 
nations  of  Christendom,  until  Christendom  in  three  centuries  had  made  it 
the  law  of  nations  to  rob  the  men  of  Africa  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness,  and  made  and  revived  the  extinct  law  of  slavery,  and  with 
armed  bands  marched  into  defenceless  villages  on  the  Senegal  and 
Gambia,  set  their  habitations  at  midnight  on  fire,  and  with  pistols,  swords, 
fetters,  and  ropes,  pursued  and  overtook  the  distracted  people  and  bound 
and  sent  them  to  this  continent  amidst  hunger,  thirst,  contagion,  disease, 
and  death,  the  survivors  in  the  pirate's  ship,  and  in  a  land  of  strangers, 
they  were  sold  to  drag  out  life  on  the  plantation  of  the  haughty,  the  thank 
less,  and  the  cruel.  By  such  deplorable  means  has  this  continent  fought 
against  her  own  prosperity. 

Mn.  STEWART  then  said  he  had  two  cases  in  his  mind,  which  illustrated 
what  all  knew  respecting  slavery,  and  few  whose  opinions  were  entitled 
to  respect  would  dare  deny  them. 

Said  MR.  S  ,  lifting  his  head  and  turning  to  the  north-east,  directing  all 
to  look,  and  see  what  they  could  behold  on  the  last  day  of  November, 
1620,  on  the  confines  of  the  Grand  Banks  of  Newfoundland,  Lo,  I  behold 
one  little  solitary  tempest-tost  and  weather-beaten  ship,  it  is  all  that  can  be 
seen  on  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  vast  intervening  solitudes,  from  the 
melancholy  wilds  of  Labrador  and  New  England's  iron-bound  shores, 
to  the  western  coasts  of  Ireland  and  the  rock-defended  Hebrides,  but  one 
lonely  ship  greets  the  eye  of  angels  or  of  men,  on  this  great  thoroughfare 
of  nations  in  our  age.  Next  in  moral  grandeur,  was  this  ship,  to  the  great 
discoverer's;  Columbus  found  a  Continent;  the  May-flower  brought  the 
seed-wheat  of  states  and  Empire.  That  is  the  May-flower,  with  its  ser 
vants  of  the  Living  God,  their  wives  and  little  ones,  hastening  to  lay  the 
foundations  of  nations  in  the  occidental  lands  of  the  setting  sun.  Hear, 
the  voice  of  prayer  to  God,  for  his  protection,  and  the  glorious  music  of 
praise,  as  it  breaks  into  the  wild  tempest  of  the  mighty  deep,  upon  the 
ear  of  God.  Here  in  this  ship  are  great  and  good  men.  Justice,  mercy, 
humanity,  respect  for  the  rights  of  all;  each  man  honored,  as  he  was 
useful  to  himself  and  others ;  labor  respected,  law-abiding  men,  con 
stitution-making  and  respecting-men ;  men,  whom  no  tyrant  could 
conquer,  or  hardship  overcome,  with  the  high  commission  sealed  by  a 
Spirit  Divine,  to  establish  religious  and  political  liberty  for  all.  This  ship 
had  the  embryo-elements  of  all  that  is  useful,  great  and  grand  in  North 
ern  institutions ;  it  was  the  great  type  of  goodness  and  wisdom,  illustrat 
ed  in  two  and  a  quarter  centuries  gone  bye ;  it  was  the  good  genius  of 
America. 

But,  look  far  in  the  south-east,  and  you  behold  on  the  same  day  in  1620, 
a  low  rakish  ship  hastening  from  tlie  tropics,  solitary  and  alone,  to  the 
New  World,  what  is  she  ?  She  is  freighted  with  the  elements  of  unmixed 
evil,  hark  !  hear  those  rattling  chains,  hear  that  cry  of  despair  and  wail 
of  anguish  as  they  die  away  in  the  unpitying  distance.  Listen  to  those 
shocking  oaths,  the  crack  of  that  flesh-cutting  whip.  Ah  !  it  is  the  first 
cargo  of  slaves  on  their  way  to  Jamestown,  Virginia.  Behold  the  May 
flower  anchored  at  Plymouth  rock,  the  slave  ship  in  James  river.  Each 
a  Parent,  one  of  the  prosperous  labor-honoring,  law-sustaining  institu 
tions  of  the  North  ;  the  other  the  Mother  of  slavery,  idleness,  lynch-law, 
ignorance,  unpaid  labor,  poverty,  and  duelling,  despotism,  the  ceaseless 
swing  of  the  whip,  and  the  peculiar  institutions  of  the  South.  These 
ships  are  the  representation  of  good  and  evil  in  the  New  World,  even  to 
our  day.  When  shall  oue  of  those  parallel  lines  come  to  an  end  ? 

Ma.  STEWART  then  proceeded  to  the  definition  and  origin  of  the  word 


10  SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY. 

slave.  He  cited  the  encyclopedia  under  title,  slave,  as  authority.  The 
word,  according  to  Vossius,  is  derived  from  sclavus,  the  name  of  a 
Scythian  people,  called  the  Sclavoni.  The  Romans  called  slaves  servi, 
from  servare,  to  keep  or  save,  being  such  as  were  not  killed  in  battle,  but 
were  saved,  to  work  or  yield  money.  A  slave  bred  in  a  family  was 
called  verna,  hence  our  word  vernacular,  or  the  slave's  tongue. 

A  Roman  slave  being  set  free,  took  the  cognomen  of  his  master  for  his 
sur  or  sir-name,  and  his  slave  name  for  his  Christian — hence,  our  sur 
name  means  the  name  of  the  lord  or  sir.  So  curiously  has  slavery  inter 
woven  itself  in  the  affairs  of  men,  that  all  men  are  made  most  singularly 
to  feel  the  disgrace  of  the  institution  in  their  paternal  name.  The  Romans 
had  those  called  mercenarily  who  had  been  rich,  but  having  become 
poor,  sold  themselves  for  a  time. 

The  Greeks  had  those  called  Prodigals,  who,  having  lost  their  estates  by 
their  extravagance,  were  sold  to  discharge  their  debts  by  law,  for  a  longer 
or  shorter  time.  Delinquents  to  the  revenue,  or  unfaithful  subtreasurers 
of  the  Roman  Empire,  were  sent  to  the  oar  as  slaves.  But  Tacitus 
describes  the  most  remarkable  slaves,  De  Moribus  Germanorum,  called 
enthusiasts,  who  were  gamblers,  who  having  staked  and  lost  their 
money,  goods  and  lands,  finally  staked  their  own  bodies,  and  i  f  they  lost,  the 
strong  and  the  young  lifted  up  their  hands  and  received  the  fetters  thereon, 
from  the  aged  and  weak,  and  were  marched  off  forthwith  to  the  slave 
market  and  sold  by  the  winner  as  slaves  for  life.  This  was  done  under 
the  code  of  a  gambler's  honor. 

Those  are  the  two  kinds,  among  the  ancients,  of  slavery,  voluntary  and 
involuntary.  Some  think  slavery  did  not  exist  before  the  Flood.  But 
Alexander  Pope  thinks  differently,  and  says  : 

"  Proud  Nimrod  first  the  bloody  chase  began, 
A  mighty  hunter,  and  his  prey  was  man." 

A  man  has  no  right  to  sell  himself,  and  if  he  had,  he  could  not  bind  his 
posterity.  A  man  is  not  allowed  to  kill  himself.— Blac.  Book  1,  C.  14. 
Montesquieu  Spirit  Laws,  B.  15,  C.  2,  and  tf. — Both  say,  if  a  man  might  be 
taken  in  war  and  made  a  slave,  this  war-right  of  the  captor  could  not 
extend  to  the  captive's  posterity.  This  alone  would  abolish  slaverv. 
The  Romans  exercised  the  power  of  life  and  death  over  a  slave.  So  Jo 
slaveholders  in  the  United  States  under  certain  circumstances;  if  the 
slave  refuse  to  work,  he,  the  master,  may,  by  slave  law,  whip  and  beat 
him  until  he  is  dead,  unless  he  submits  to  go  to  work;  or  if  a  slave 
attempt  to  run  away,  and  the  master  commands  him  to  stop,  and  he 
refuses,  the  master  may  shoot  him  down,  and  the  slave  laws  of  more 
than  ten  States  say,  amen.  The  Romans  were  very  cruel,  and  had  an 
Island  in  the  Tiber,  where  by  law,  they  might  send  old,  useless  and  sick 
slaves  to  starve  to  death  or  die.  It  is  said  as  an  evidence  of  slavery's 
hardening  of  the  heart  to  human  suffering,  that  the  elder  Cato  sold  his 
•superannuated  slaves  for  any  price  rather  than  maintain  them.  The 
Romans  had  slave  dungeons  under  ground,  called  "ergnstuin,"  v.  here 
the  slaves  were  worked  in  chains.  The  same  in  Sicily  ,"which  country 
was  cultivated  by  slaves  in  chains.  Eunus  and  Athenio  excited  an  insur 
rection  of  60,000  slaves  and  broke  up  the  dungeons. 
.  But  we  are  more  immediately  interested  in  the  light  in  which  our 
English  ancestors  viewed  these  great  questions  of  human  rights,  and  we 
have  derived  most  of  our  ideas  of  law  and  liberty  from  that  interesting 
source.  The  case  of  Somerset,  to  be  found  in  the  20th  Vol.  of  British 
State  Trials,  also  in  Long's  Reports  and  Burrows',  is  one  of  manifold  inter 
est.  It  was  justly  said  by  that  great  lawyer  and  civilian,  Mr.  Hargrave, 
the  counsel  of  the  slave  Somerset,  though  greatly  aided  in  his  brief  by 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 


11 


that  eminent  philanthropist,  Granville  Sharp,  "  that  slavery  corrupts  the 
morals  of  the  master  by  freeing  him  from  those  restraints  so  necessary  for 
the  control  of  the  human  passions,  so  beneficial  in  promoting  the  prac 
tice  and  confirming  the  habit  of  virtue."  It  is  often  dangerous  to  the 
master,  as  exciting  implacable  resentments  on  the  part  of  the  slave. 

Said  MR.  STEWART,  slavery  communicates  all  the  afflictions  of  life  to 
its  victim  without  leaving  scarce  any  of  the  pleasures  ;  it  depresses  the 
excellence  of  the  slave's  r.ature,  by  denying  to  the  slave  the  ordinary 
means  of  improvement  and  elevation  in  the  social  scale  of  existence  ;  it 
brings  forth  the  gross,  malignant,  cruel,  mean,  deceitful  and  hypocritical 
portions  of  human  nature,  without  a  counterpoise  or  a  power  of  suppres 
sion.  The  slave  is  always  the  natural  and  implacable  enemy  of  the  State, 
he  owes  it  nothing  but  deadly  hate. 

Said  MR.  S.,  instead  of  the  Constitution  and  the  laws  being  his  shield 
and  his  inheritance,  they  are  employed  to  strip  him  of  his  natural  rights, 
of  life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  existing  antecedent  to  all 
human  compacts  ;  and  what  should  be  employed  for  his  protection  and 
defence  in  the  shape  of  law,  is  used  for  his  prostration  and  destruction. 
It  is  the  element  of  constant  fear  to  the  family  and  the  State,  and  is 
therefore  real  weakness  to  the  State  from  the  constant  apprehension  from 
insurrection  at  home,  or  invasion  from  abroad,  when  it  is  always 
expected  the  slave  will  range  himself  in  the  ranks  of  the  invader  of  the 
land.  The  slave  has  no  country,  no  real  home  for  which  he  will  fight. 
Judge  of  the  surprise  of  General  La  Fayette,  said  MR.  S.,  when  on  the  first 
day  of  being  introduced  to  the  American  Congress  in  Philadelphia,  in  the 
summer  of  1777,  he  listened  to  the  extraordinary  request  of  South  Carolina 
to  be  released  from  raising  and  equipping  the  quota  of  troops  designed 
by  Congress  to  be  raised  by  that  State  as  her  proportion  in  the  eventful 
struggle  of  the  Revolution,  on  the  ground  if  she  spared  that  number  of 
troops  from  the  State,  it  was  feared  that  there  might  be  a  servile  insur 
rection,  that  it  was  necessary  the  troops  should  remain  at  home  to  restrain 
a  domestic  enemy  in  her  own  bosom.  If  all  the  States  had  been  under 
the  weight  of  slavery  like  South  Carolina,  our  Independence  could  never 
have  been  achieved.  Such  States  as  South  Carolina  may  bluster  and 
threaten  their  brethren  in  time  of  peace  with  nullification  and  revolution, 
but.  when  war  comes,  her  power  to  act  out  of  her  own  territory  will  be 
in  the  inverse  ratio  of  the  noise  and  threats  she  made  in  time  of  peace. 
The  enemy  of  her  own  household  will  furnish  a  good  market,  not  only 
for  her  capabilities  but  her  courage.  If  the  home  market  is  the  best  one, 
she  will  find  one  at  her  own  door,  as  ample  as  her  productions  maybe 
abundant. 

In  the  late  war,  about  midsummer  of  1814,  this  nation,  said  MR.  S., 
was  overwhelmed  with  shame,  grief  and  astonishment,  at  the  capture 
and  sack  of  the  city  of  Washington,  by  a  body  of  British  troops,  soldiers, 
sailors  and  marines. 

The  public,  authorities  hail  sufficient  notice  of  the  enemy's  intention, 
the  militia  of  the  three  cities  of  the  District,  and  of  the  surrounding  coun 
ties  in  the  adjacent  portions  of  the  old  States  of  Virginia  and  Maryland, 
could  have  driven  the  British  force  into  the  sea,  had  not  a  report  been 
universally  circulated  on  the  morning  of  the  battle,  and  on  the  battle 
ground  at  Bladensburgh,  that  the  slaves  of  the  District,  and  of  the  adjacent 
counties,  from  which  the  militia  were  drawn  for  the  defence  of  Wash 
ington,  were  to  rise  that  day  in  insurrection  during  the  absence  of  their 
masters.  The  moment  the  British  approached ^our  troops,  President 
Madison,  with  the  Secretaries  of  the  Departments,  fled  from  position  to 
position,  abandoning,  as-  all  who  know  the  ground,  one  favorable  place 
after  another,  and  finally  retreated  eight  miles  from  Bladensburgh  to 


12  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

Washington,  and  at  last  the  retreat  became  a  general  rout ;  each  man 
having  his  mind  on  the  danger  he  feared  in  his  own  house  or  plantation 
from  the  insurrection  of  his  slaves,  rather  than  the  immediate  work  of 
defending  the  Capitol  of  the  nation.  This,  said  MR.  S.,  is  a  perfect 
solution  of  that  disgraceful  affair.  It  was  the  natural  consequence  which 
the  weakness  of  a  servile  population  creates,  and  the  fear  in  a  day  of 
adversity  which  it  will  inspire. 

MR.  8.,  said  he  learned  the  cause  of  our  disaster  in  1818,  while  going 
over  the  ground  of  this  disgraceful  retreat,  with  a  General,  who  was  a 
Brigadier  on  that  mortifying  day,  who  assigned  the  above  reasons  to  MR. 
S.,  as  the  cause  of  this  most  shameful  result. 

MR.  S.  said,  John  Locke  declared  a  right  to  preserve  life  is  inalienable, 
that  freedom  from  the  exercise  of  arbitrary  power  is  essential  for  the 
exercise  of  this  right. 

Said  MR.  S.,  in  the  sixth  year  of  the  reign  of  Edward  III.,  1334,  a  law 
was  enacted  declaring  that  all  idle  vagabonds  should  be  made  slaves, 
fed  on  bread  and  water  or  small  drink,  and  refuse  meat,  and  should  wear 
an  iron-ring  around  their  necks  and  legs,  and  should  be  compelled  by 
beating,  chaining  and  otherwise,  to  perform  the  work  assigned,  were  it 
never  so  vile ;  the  spirit  of  the  English  nation  could  not  brook  this,  as 
applied  to  the  most  abandoned  rogues,  and  repealed  the  law  in  two 
years  after  its  enactment.  But  nothing  places  the  judiciary  of  England 
on  higher  ground,  than  its  patient  work  in  extirpating  villeinage  from 
England.  It  was  an  institution  connected  with  the  feudal  system,  and  the 
Norman  Conquest  of  1060,  and  the  other  conquests  obtained  in  previous 
ages,  and  was  nearly  allied  to  slavery,  in  everything  but  the  name,  so 
that  it  is  supposed  at  one  period,  there  was  not  less  than  three  quarters 
of  the  population  of  the  kingdom,  who  were  either  villeins  regardant,  or 
villeins  in  gross.  The  dishonor  of  such  a  state  of  things  has  been  so 
deeply  felt  by  thousands,  who  are  descendants  of  these  bondmen  in 
England,  and  who  now  rank  high  in  the  scale  of  society,  that  there  ie 
rather  a  desire  to  conceal  than  reveal  the  odious  state  in  which  our 
ancestors  existed ;  therefore,  David  Hume  and  Sir  William  Black  stone 
are  very  niggardly  in  dealing  out  information  on  an  infamous  and  obsolete 
institution,  so  humiliating  to  our  ancestors,  and  humbling  to  their 
descendants. 

But,  said  MR.  S.,  to  understand  the  terrible  hardships  endured  and  suf 
fered  by  our  ancestors,  for  many  generations,  and  the  glorious  way  of 
their  deliverance  by  the  judges  of  England,  may  furnish  us  with  valuable 
deductions,  which  may  be  applied  to  solve  any  difficulty  growing  out  of 
the  causes  under  consideration,  by  learning  what  use  a  court  may  make 
of  law  to  establish  justice. 

A  villein  in  blood  and  by  tenure  was  one  whom  the  lord  might  whip 
and  imprison.  The  villein  could  acquire  no  property  except  for  the  lord. 
"  Quidqmd  acquiritur  servo,  acquiritur  domino."  A  villein  regardant  passed 
with  the  land  of  his  lord,  on  which  he  lived  as  a  kind  of  property  like  the 
trees,  but  might  be  severed  and  sold  when  the  lord  pleased. — Co.  Little 
ton  117  a.  If  he  was  a  villein  in  gross,  he  was  an  hereditament,  or  chat 
tel  real,  accord'ng  to  the  lord's  interest,  being  descendable  to  the  heir, 
when  the  lord  was  absolute  owner  of  the  soil,  and  to  the  executor,  when 
the  lord  was  possessor  for  only  a  term  of  years.  The  common  law  held 
if  both  parents  were  villeins,  or  the  father  only,  the  issue  were  villeins. 
The  child  at  common  law  followed  the  condition  of  the  father,  Partu* 
sequitur  patrcm  ;  while  the  civil  law  held,  Partus  sequitur  ventrem.  There 
fore,  it  was  a  departure  from  all  principle,  for  the  slaveholders  of  the 
United  States,  who  if  they  inherited  anything  from  England  it  "was  the 
common  law,  to  substitute  the  principle  of  the  civil  law,  because  the/ 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  13 

could  make  more  money  by  it,  and  say  the  child  in  slavery  should  follow 
the  condition  of  the  mother,  when  the  common  law  said  it  should  follow 
the  father  !  But  why  reason  on  a  subject,  when  brute  force  and  selfish 
ness  stand  in  the  place  of  right  reason  and  truth?  Had,  said  MR.  S.,  the 
doctrine  of  the  common  law  been  followed,  slavery  from  its  mulattoism 
a  significancy  of  the  times,  would  have  been  in  its  last  quarter.  The 
object,  said  MR.  S.,  of  drawing  this  all  but  obsolete  learning  from  past  cen 
turies,  was  not  to  make  a  public  parade  for  the  sake  of  its  strangeness; 
but  to  show  in  the  great  struggle,  in  past  ages,  between  slavery  and  lib 
erty,  how  the  judiciary  of  England  conducted  itself  in  those  encounters 
between  the  powers  of  light  and  darkness. 

The  Courts  of  Law  in  the  British  Isles,  from  the  Conquest  down,  employ 
ed  every  intendment  of  humanity,  every  device,  every  fiction,  in  behalf  of 
the  unfortunate  serf.  One  rule  was  for  the  court  always  to  presume  in. 
favor  of  liberty  ;  but  in  some  thirteen  States  of  our  Union,  if  a  man  is  of  Afri 
can  descent,  he  is  presumed  a  slave,  until  the  victim  proves  a  negative.  In 
England  the  onus  probandi  lay  on  him  who  asserted  slavery  or  villeinage 
to  prove  it.  If  a  villein  prosecuted  a  writ  of  Homine  Replegiando  against 
his  lord,  on  the  trial  the  lord  had  to  prove  affirmatively  the  plaintiff  was 
his  villein,  and  the  villein,  though  the  plaintiff,  might  stand  still  in  court 
till  that  was  done  by  the  defendant.  The  lord's  remedy  for  a  fugitive  vil 
lein  was  the  writ  Nativo  Habendo,  or  Neifty.  If  the  lord  seized  the 
villein  by  his  writ  of  Nativo  Habendo,  the  villein  procured  the  writ  of 
Homine  Replegiando,  or  Libertate  Probanda. 

By  the  writ  of  Nativo  Habendo,  the  master  asserted  slavery,  and  if  the 
master  was  once  nonsuited,  he  could  never  sue  the  serf  again,  and  the  vil 
lein  might  plead  the  record  of  nonsuit  as  a  perpetual  bar.  Not  so,  if  the 
poor  villein  was  nonsuited  on  the  writ  of  Homine  Replegiando,  or  Libertate 
Probanda.  He  might  sue  again  for  his  liberty,  and  the  record  of  nonsuit,  if 
made  ten  times  or  more  against  him,  could  never  be  pleaded  or  used  against 
him.  The  slightest  mistake  on  the  part  of  the  lord,  or  accident,  was  laid 
hold  of  by  the  court  to  defeat  the  recovery  of  the  lord. — Somerset's  Case, 
20th  vol.  of  Haswell's  State  Trials.  So  this  honorable  court  of  New  Jersey 
should  do,  said  Mr.  S.,  under  the  new  constitution  of  this  State — the  con 
stitution  adopted  by  the  people  in  1844.  This  court,  in  accordance  with 
the  noble  example  of  England's  judiciary,  should  make  every  intendment 
in  behalf  of  your  bondmen,  as  between  the  selfish  and  cruel  demand  of 
slavery  and  the  ceaseless  cry  of  liberty.  Give  the  slave  the  benefit  of 
every  sensible  doubt,  which  may  cloud  the  mind  of  this  Honorable  court. 

Sueing,  or  being  sued  by  a  villein,  freed  him.  The  lord's  granting  him  an 
imparlance,  manumitted  him,  or  asking  an  imparlance  of  the  villein  did 
the  same.  Almost,  said  Mr.  S.,  the  last  case  of  villeinage  reported,  was 
near  the  year  1600,  on  the  accession  of  James  I.  Crouch's  case  is  re 
ported  in  Dyer.  All  of  these  obstructions  thrown  in  the  way  of  this  sort 
of  slavery,  are  most  interesting  legal  relics  of  servitude,  showing  the  meta 
physical  dress  in  which  it  was  clothed  by  our  subtle  and  ingenious 
ancestors.  These  were  patterns  of  extinct  fa'shions  of  opinions,  now  only 
to  be  found  in  the  ponderous  tomes  of  antiquity,  garnered  up  in  the  library 
of  the  legal  antiquarian ;  as  the  visors,  steel  and  brass  armor,  of  the 
10th  century,  disclose  to  us  the  mode  and  appearance  of  the  knights  on 
the  field  of  battle  in  the  days  of  chivalry. 

To  establish  villeinage,  the  villein  must  be  proved  such  by  two  other 
male  villeins,  ex  eodem  stirpe,  from  the  same  stock,  or  the  villein  might  con 
fess  in  open  court,  being  a  court  of  record,  that  he  was  one.  The  female 
villein  was  not  allowed  her  testimony  to  prove  a  man  a  villein.  A  villein 
was  called  nativus,  as  well  as  villanus,  from  the  lord's  villa  nativus 
from  being  found  on  the  sal — a  native.  The  lord,  on  declaring  on  a.  writ 


14  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

nativo  habendo,  had  to  bring  his  two  wilnesses  with  him  at  the  same  in 
stant  he  declared,  and  if  he  did  not,  the  villein  went  for  ever  free.  A  man 
might  plead  hastardy,  in  himself,  father,  grandfather,  or  ancestor,  and  if 
the  plea  be  true,  that  alone  manumitted  the  villein,  for  the  filius  nullius  est 
filius  populi.  For  if  there  was  a  link  of  illegitimacy,  it  set  the  line  of  de 
scendants  from  the  bastard  free,  because  the  lord  could  not  show  that  he 
was  the  son  of  his  bondmen  in  particular. 

Another  plea  of  the  villein  was  called  adventiffby  the  Norman  French 
Law,  showing  that  a  person  was  born  off  from  the  manor,  and  if  true,  it 
set  the  man  and  his  descendants  free. 

Said  MR.  S.,  Sir  Thomas  Grantham,  about  the  year  1684, bought  a  mon 
ster  in  the  East  Indies,  and  brought  him  to  England  as  a  show.  The 
monster  had  growing  on  his  breast,  the  entire  parts  of  a  child,  except  its 
head.  The  monster  being  carried  through  the  kingdom  as  a  show,  was 
baptized,  and  he  brought  a  writ  of  Homine  Replegiando  against  his  master, 
and  was  set  free. 

Said  MR.  S.,  I  have  done  with  villeinage  in  England, — such  in  a  dark  age 
was  the  view  which  learned  jurists  and  judges  took  of  this  important 
matter.  The  judiciary  in  many  countries  have  been,  at  different 
periods  of  civilisation,  the  last  branch  of  human  government,  to  feel 
the  force  of  popular  opinion,  in  behalf  of  liberty,  or  employ  its  power  in 
accelerating  the  march  of  freedom,  or  the  overthrow  of  strongholds  of 
fortified  oppression.  It  is  not,  said  Mr.  S.,  a  matter  of  complaint  that  the 
judiciary  is  the  hold-back  power  of  the  State,  or  conservative  in  its  charac 
ter,  but  with  all  that,  it  has  a  high  mission  to  discharge  on  the  part  of 
liberty.  And  the  English  judiciary  have  shown  the  world  during  those 
dark  ages  what  they  understood  to  be  contained  in  their  commissions, 
touching  England's  bondmen,  even,  under  the  iron  rule  of  the  haughty 
Norman  and  his  imperious  descendants,  who,  by  rights  of  conquest,  and 
by  the  subserviency  of  supple  parliaments  connected  with  the  agency  of 
the  Feudal  System,  had  reduced  four-fifths  of  the  inhabitants  of  England 
to  the  condition  of  villeins  regardant,  and  villeins  in  gross,  attached  to  the 
soil,  or  the  person  of  some  grandee  of  the  realm,  as  slaves,  whom  their 
lord  might  scourge,  sell,  or  transfer  with  the  soil,  or  at  will. 

The  judiciary  of  England  became  the  Temple  of  Mercy  to  which  these 
unfortunate  bondmen  cast  their  imploring  eyes  for  relief  through  a  suc 
cession  of  five  cruel  centuries,  during  eighteen  generations  of  men 
The  courts  of  English  law  during  this  long  period,  employed  all  the 
subtleties,  fictions,  and  presumptions,  in  which  the  English  Law  abounds, 
in  behalf  of  the  liberty  of  these  grossly  injured  men,  so  that  at  last,  the 
sublime  moral  spectacle  was  presented  to  this  world,  of  many  unrepealed 
Statutes,  and  the  common  law  still  in  full  force  in  favor  of  villeinage, 
while  the  bloody  useless  fetters  hung  on  the  tyrant's  dungeon  walls,  but 
the  last  bondman  of  the  three-fourths  of  the  population  of  a  mighty 
kingdom  was  enfranchised  from  captivity  by  force  of  England's  glorious 
judiciary  alone.  The  king,  and  iron-mailed  barons,  the  land  owners,  aud 
man-holders,  were  foiled,  and  their  prey  taken  from  their  power  by  the 
resolution  of  the  judges,  who,  being  determined,  did  administer  justice 
through  the  law. 

Montesquieu  says  that  Aristotle.in  reasoning  to  sustain  slavery  as  deriv 
ed  from  war,  cites  authorities  from  barbarous  ages,  and  appears  in  this 
matter  as  unphilosophical  as  he  does  in  the  nature  of  the  thing.  The 
war-power  to  be  the  source  of  a  right,  when  the  war  is  prosecuted  for  no 
other  motive  except  the  value  of  the  captive,  is  as  rational  as  to  give  the 
robber  title  to  his  spoil,  because  he  had  the  courage  to  take  it — making 
a  crime  the  most  bold  and  daring,  the  parent  of  a  civil  right.  Behold 
bleeding  Africa,  for  three  hundred  years  her  bleeding  side  has  flowed,  and 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  15 

yet  flows  on,  unstaunched  by  the  humanity  of  the  Nations.  Behold  this 
accursed  crime  which  has  crawled  up  with  beastly  impudence,  and 
enthroned  itself  as  one  amongst  the  laws  of  Nations.  Laws  of  Nations ! 
What  was  this  law  of  Nations?  That  Christendom  had  a  common  right 
to  plunder,  burn,  murder,  enslave  irredeemably,  and  make  property  of 
the  inhabitants  of  that  ill-fated  continent,  in  and  through  all  coming 
generations  of  their  posterity,  A  law  of  Nations!  that  all  law,  justice* 
mercy,  humanity,  should  be  suspended,  as  to  one  quarter  of  the  globe ; 
a  law  of  Nations,  that  piracy,  murder,  fraud,  arson,  kidnapping,  ravish 
ment  and  stealing,  should  be  considered  lawful  as  an  injunction  of  the 
law  of  Nations,  to  be  honored  and  obeyed.  A  law  of  Nations 
directly  at  war  with  every  other  law  constituting  that  code ;  a  law  of 
Nations,  striking  justice  down,  and  sending  it  into  eternal  banishment 
from  the  world,  subverting  the  decalogue  of  God,  blaspheming  Omnipo 
tence,  brandishing  the  powers  of  perdition  in  the  face  of  the  Allseeing, 
calling  this  bold  defiance  of  the  Almighty,  the  law  of  Nations  !  Out  upon 
such  infinite  perversion,  such  inexpressible  criminality.  Russia,  Prussia, 
Holland,  Austria,  England,  France,  Sardinia  and  the  United  States,  in 
the  last  forty  years,  as  it  regards  themselves,  by  treaty  and  legislation; 
have  abolished  their  respective  portions  in  this  frightful  law  of  Nations, 
while  Spain,  Portugal  and  Brazil,  three  of  the  basest  kingdoms  of  earth, 
are  now  retrograding  into  the  darkness  of  barbarism  and  infamy,  and 
without  competition  are  now  almost  the  exclusive  proprietors  of  this 
law  of  Nations  and  its  abounding  criminality.  Look  at  Spain  three  hun 
dred  and  fifty-three  years  ago,  as  she  stood  on  the  day  of  Columbus'  dis 
covery,  head  and  shoulders  above  the  powers  of  Europe.  Conquest, 
avarice,  slavery  and  idleness,  which  she  introduced  to  the  New  World, 
re-acted  on  her,  and  in  our  day,  she  has  been  stripped  of  her  mines,  her 
provinces,  viceroyalties,  kingdoms  and  one  half  of  a  continent,  and  is 
now  reduced  to  the  Island  of  Cuba,  with  its  crimes  of  flowing  blood, 
slavery,  idleness  and  avarice ;  these  relatives  have  been  punished  in  so 
signal  a  manner,  in  the  case  of  Spain,  by  Him  who  rules  the  destinies  of 
Nations,  that  to  deny  it,  is  a  proof  that  our  ignorance  is  only  surpassed 
by  our  infidelity. 

The  Court  will  pardon  me  in  these  remarks,  which  in  the  first  instance 
may  appear  remote  from  this  question,  yet  when  we  consider  the  charac 
ter  of  the  human  mind,  they  will  all  be  found  to  bear  on  the  great  question 
in  the  Constitution  of  this  State.  What  do  we  mean  by  liberty  and  inde 
pendence  ?  Infinitely  absurd  to  say,  a  man  has  power  even  in  himself,  by 
contract,  to  dispose  of  his  own  liberty  and  all  the  rights  he  possesses. 
Society  has  claims  on  him,  his  wife,  his  children,  and  his  God,  which  he 
cannot  cancel  by  selling  himself  to  another.  Yes,  coming  generations 
have  a  voice  in  the  question.  He  has  no  more  right  to  sell  his  body  than 
he  has  to  commit  suicide,  for,  by  so  doing,  he  passes  from  manhood  to 
thing,  or  chattel-hood,  and  becomes  a  piece  of  breathing  property.  The 
great  rights  of  manhood  are  not  given  to  us  by  our  Creator,  to  give,  sell, 
and  barter  away.  The  powers  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happi 
ness,  cannot  be  resigned  to  a  power  inferior,  to  that  of  the  one,  from  whom 
they  have  been  received.  .'; 

As  to  consideration  that  might  be  given  for  those  God- inherited  rights, 
described  in  your  Constitution,  said  MR.  S.,  as  unalienable,  who  is  rich 
enough  to  buy  them,  who  is  able  to  make  title  to  them  ?  Suppose  that 
some  Croesus  owned  this  continent,  and  the  mines  of  Golconda,  and  should 
offer  them  to  me  to  become  his  slave,  according  to  the  laws  of  South  Caro 
lina  and  Louisiana ;  at  the  same  instant,  he  executes  for  the  considera 
tion  of  my  person,  a  deed  of  the  continent  and  mines  to  me,  and  I  execute 
to  him  a  deed  of  my  body.  The  purchaser  of  me,  by  the  operation  of  the 


16 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY. 


slave  laws,  instantly  becomes  repossessed  of  what  passed  to  me  by  grant, 
under  the  maxim  that  the  slave  and  all  he  hath,  or  may  find  or  acquire, 
belongeth  to  the  master,  therefore,  I  the  slave  would  say  the  considera 
tion  having  failed,  and  by  operation  of  law,  my  master  having  become  re» 
seized  of  his  continent  and  mines,  I  am  free  again.  Thus,  it  would  be 
found  impossible  to  make  a  bargain  resting  upon  equity,  for  the  sale  of 
one's  person,  as  the  whole  subject  revolves  in  a  circle  of  never-ending 
absurdities,  justice  leaving  the  parties  where  it  found  them  :  man  with 
equal  success  having  attempted  to  quadrate  the  circle,  create  perpetual 
motion,  and  make  a  contract  for  the  sale  of  a  man,  by  his  own  agree 
ment,  on  consideration  of  value  for  value  received  by  the  slave  upon  the 
principles  of  slaveholding  law  !  If  a  man  could  not  perform  the  act  of 
making  himself  a  slave,  how  could  another  do  it  for  him,  or  a  state  or  a 
government,  without  doing  an  act  repugnant  to  that  law  of  nature  spoken 
of  in  the  first  article  of  your  new  Constitution  ?  When,  said  MR.  S.,  I 
applied  for  these  writs  of  Habeas  Corpus  some  days  since,  to  one  branch 
of  this  court,  it  was  remarked  by  one  member  of  the  court,  that  this  case 
would  require  great  consideration  from  its  effect  on  the  towns  of  this 
State,  as  it  might  subject  said  towns  to  the  maintenance  of  worn-out,  aged 
and  infirm  slaves,  in  the  shape  of  paupers.  That  contingency  is  possible, 
said  MR.  S.,  but  forms  no  ground  against  awarding  to  the  bondmen,  that 
constitutional  justice,  so  long  withheld  by  the  consent  of  these  towns,  as 
well  as  the  avaricious  masters.  It  was  argued  in  the  Somerset  case  by 
Mr.  Dunning,  the  Counsel  of  the  claimant  of  Somerset,  that  if  this  slave 
was  set  free  by  the  judgment  of  the  court,  there  were  then  at  large  fourteen 
thousand  slaves  in  England,  belonging  to  gentlemen  in  the  West  Indies, 
who,  for  their  own  convenience,  had  brought  them  to  England,  and  valu 
ing  them  at  £50  per  head,  they  would  amount  to  £700,000,  or  £3,500, 000. 
What  was  the  memorable  reply  of  Lord  Mansfield  ?  It  was,  "  that  a  man's 
natural  relations  go  with  him  everywhere,  his  municipal  to  the  bounds  of 
the  country  of  his  abode"  And  in  answer  to  the  suggestion  of  a  loss  by 
the  proprietors  of  the  14,000  negro  slaves  in  England,  said  Lord  Mansfield, 
V  we  Jiave  no  authority  to  regulate  the  conditions  on  which  law  shall  operate.* 
We  cannot  direct  the  law,  the  law  must  direct  us." 

So,  said  MR.  STEWART,  the  argumentum  ab  inconvenienti  should  not  apply 
in  this  case.  If  these  slaves  have  been  worn  out  by  the  consent  of  the 
public,  if  that  public  have  folded  their  arms  in  silence,  and  witnessed  the 
robbery  of  these  men,  from  year  to  year,  of  their  earnings  (which  might 
have  supported  them  in  the  evening  of  life),  it  is  right  they  should  sup 
port  them  when  they  can  toil  no  more  in  the  enjoyment  of  their  just 
liberty.  For  it  is  always  dangerous  for  men  to  see  liberty  struck  down  in 
others,  and  because  they  do  not  taste  its  bitterness  personally,  passively 
to  look  on  without  resistance.  It  will  sooner  or  later  strike  back  on 
themselves.  That  man  is  not  worthy  of  liberty,  who  will  not  fly  to  the 
rescue  of  his  brother  when  he  sees  his  freedom  struck  down  or  assailed. 
Our  liberties  are  always  invaded  when  the  humblest  individual  is  depriv 
ed  of  his,  without  our  making  all  the  resistance  within  our  power.  At  the 
time  of  the  argument  of  the  Somerset  case,  in  1771,  the  world  was  full 
of  slavery,  especially  the  West  Indies,  and  the  colonies  of  this  continent — 
it  was  tolerated  in  all.  But  behold  what  may  be  done  by  the  indomitable 
perseverance  of  one  man,  if  that  man  be  Granville  Sharpe.  He  was  a  gen 
tleman  of  small  means,  but  of  a  great  heart,  and  had  for  some  time  made 
the  study  of  human  rights  a  subject  of  great  consideration.  He  had  read, 
thought,  and  written  in  their  behalf,  and  was  the  prosecutor  who  interested 
himself  for  Somerset,  the  slave  of  one  William  Stuart,  a  West  India 
planter,  and  prepared  much  of  the  brief  of  Mr.  Hargrave,  and  obtained 
the  writ  of  Habeas  Corpus,  returnable  in  the  court  of  King's  Bench,  at  his 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  17 

own  expense.  The  court  heard  the  argument  patiently  the  live-long 
dav,  and  decided  against  the  slave,  on  the  authority  of  a  case  in  1749,  in 
Lord  Hardwick's  and  Lord  Talbot's  time.  Nothing  discouraged  Granville 
Sharpe-  at  the  next  term  he  brought  up  Somerset  a  second  time,  and 
the  question  was  so  important,  the  court  heard  the  argument  a  second 
time,  and  decided  as  before  against  the  slave.  Poor  Granville  Sharpe 
still  contended  that  a  slave  "  could  not  breathe  in  England,"  and  having 
spent  months  in  deep  study,  upon  the  law  of  England,  though  a  layman, 
he  brought  up  Somerset  for  the  third  time  before  the  court  of  King's 
Bench  which  had  Lord  Mansfield  for  its  chief,  who  did  not  meet  poor 
Sharpe  and  his  counsel  with  a  rebuke  for  his  unconquerable  fanaticism 
and  obstinacy,  nor  did  the  court  throw  down  the  common  impediment 
to  the  march  of  mind  and  further  consideration,  by  saying  "  res  adjudicata," 
"res  adjudicata!"  No  !  where  human  liberty  was  concerned,  or  the  great 
rights  of  self-ownership  staked  upon  human  reasoning  and  judicial  deter 
mination,  Lord  Mansfield  was  not  in  haste  to  say  "  we  have  decided 
against  human  nature."  The  cause  was  argued  a  third  time  for  a  day  in 
Westminster  Hall,  and  Granville  Sharpe  had,  since  the  last  argument, 
descended  into  the  deepest  wells  of  English  liberty  and  brought  up 
a  draught  of  the  waters  of  life,  liberty,  morcy,  and  law,  so  pure,  that  when 
it  was  ^commended  to  the  lips  of  the  judges,  they  were  made  wise,  the 
scales  fell  from  their  eyes,  and  they  saw  in  its  length  and  breadth  the 
mighty  truth  beaming  on  the  forehead  of  justice  herself, — "  that  slaves 
cannot  breathe  in  England,"  and  the  light  of  that  day  has  shone  on  with 
increasing  strength  and  beauty,  until  we  can  now  say,  that  the  sun  which 
never  sets  upon  the  realms  of  the  British  Empire,  beholds  in  his  circuit 
through  the  heavens,  no  slave  to  crouch  beneath  her  vast  illimitable 
power. 

But  oh  !  what  shall  we  say  of  the  sublime  humanity  of  Lord  Mansfield 
and  his  compeers,  who  were  not  afraid  to  confess  they  had  been  wrong, 
and  had  the  magnanimity  to  say  it  before  a  slaveholding  age  ?  This  day 
saw  the  longest  stride  which  British  greatness  ever  took  on  the  highway 
of  human  glory. 

Would  to  Heaven,  said  MR.  S.,  that  all  courts  might  imitate  the  illus 
trious  example  in  administering  justice  in  the  sublime  humility,  which 
dignified  the  court  and  exalted  our  kind,  as  in  the  case  of  Somerset ! 
The  great  principles  established  in  the  Somerset  case  awakened  the 
philanthropy  of  England,  and  put  forth  its  strength  in  1783,  '88,  '92,  '96, 
'97,  and  finally,  in  1806,  was  successful  in  the  abolition  of  the  African  slave 
trade  by  Parliament.  Wilberforce,  Pitt,  and  Fox  were  foiled  again  and 
again,  in  Parliament,  the  theatre  of  their  eloquence,  and  seat  of  their 
power,  but  justice  finally  prevailed.  This  was  the  first  great  blow  struck 
for  the  man  of  Africa,  in  three  hundred  years  from  the  beginning  of  his 
American  and  West  Indian  enslavement.  But  from  that  day,  the  vindi 
cation  of  his  rights  has  been  onward.  Congress,  in  1774,  recommended 
the  ceasing  of  the  African  slave-trade  in  December,  1775,  but  it  was  not 
abolished  until  Jan.,  1808,  by  a  law  passed  the  March  before,  in  1807. 
Three  acts  of  Congress  were  passed  in  1814,  1820,  and  in  1824,  increasing 
the  penalties  against  transgressors,  until  it  finally  declared  all  who  were 
engaged  therein,  were  pirates,  and  subject  to  the  pirate's  doom.  An  act 
of  Congress  passed  in  1787,  declared  involuntary  servitude,  or  slavery, 
should  never  exist  in  the  North  Western  Territory,  comprising  the  present 
States  of  Ohio,  Indiana,  Illinois,  Michigan,  and  the  Territories  of  Wiscon 
sin  and  Iowa.  These  early  acts  of  national  legislation  show  which  way 
the  mind  of  the  nation  pointed  at  this  time. 

A  slave  is  a  rational  human  being,  endowed  with  volition  and  under 
standing,  like  the  rest  of  mankind,  and  whatever  he  lawfully  acquires 
2 


18  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

and  gains  possession  of,  by  finding  or  otherwise,  is  the  acquirement  and 
possession  of  his  master. — 4  Dessaus.,  266.  1  Stewart  Rep.,  320 — s.  p.  A 
slave  connot  contract  matrimony  ;  their  earnings  and  their  children  belong 
to  the  master. — Slave-Law.  Indians  are  held  as  slaves  in  New  Jersey. — 
Halsteaii's  Rep  ,374. 

Behold  the  shameful  injustice  of  the  Law  of  Slavery. 

If  it  be  found  by  a  jury  on  inspection,  that  the  person  claimed  to  be  a 
slave  is  white,  the  claimant  must  prove  him  a  slave  or  he  will  30  free; 
but  if  the  jury  find  the  person  to  be  of  African  descent,  the  law  of  slavery 
presumes  the  person  a  slave,  by  whomsoever  he  may  be  claimed,  and 
the  burden  is  thrown  on  the  alleged  slave  to  prove  a  negative,  that  he 
is  not  a  slave. — Wheeler's  Law  of  Slavery,  22.  The  owner  of  a  female  slave 
may  give  her  to  one  person,  and  the  children  she  may  thereafter  have  to 
another ! — Law  of  Slavery,  2.  A  slave  cannot  be  a  witness  before  any 
Court  or  Jury  against  a  free  white  in  the  land  for  the  greatest  injustice. 
This  is  one  of  its  most  horrible  features. 

Look,  said  MR.  S.,  to  the  case  of  an  alien-white-child.  Suppose  her  to 
be  the  daughter  of  parents  of  the  lowest  class  of  those  wno  migrate 
from  Ireland  to  America,  and  that  these  parents  should  die  on  their  pas 
sage  over  the  Atlantic,  leaving  to  the  mercy  of  New  Jersey  Laws,  and 
the  good  people  of  Perth  Amboy,  their  daughter,  twelve  years  old,  who 
cannot  read  or  write,  barefooted,  destitute  and  friendless.  Under  your 
laws,  the  Overseers  of  the  poor  bind  her  out,  to  the  Mayor  of  Trenton ; 
she  has  lived  with  this  rich,  popular  and  influential  citizen  but  one  little 
month;  when  by  violence  she  is  dishonored,  by  her  master,  the  Mayor. 
Is  he  safe  from  the  retributions  of  justice  ?  Is  she  deprived  of  her  oath? 
No.  She  comes  friendless  and  lonely,  and  knocks  at  the  door  of  your 
Grand-Jury-room.  Humble  and  feeble  as  is  that  knock,  it  is  quickly  heard 
by  the  acuteness  of  humanity's  ear.  She  enters  the  vestibule  of  the  great 
temple  of  justice,  and  immediately  the  majesty  of  the  entire  law  of  the 
land,  not  only  of  New  Jersey  but  of  this  vast  Empire,  stands  in  its 
mighty  invisibility  around  for  her  protection,  ready  to  be  revealed  in  its 
power.  She  is  invited,  on  oath,  to  tell  the  story  of  her  wrongs,  the 
indignant  Grand-Jurors  listen  and  believe,  and  find  a  bill  against  the 
Mayor;  she  goes  and  comes  under  the  law's  broad  shield.  This  haughty 
man  is  found  by  the  officers  of  the  law,  is  arrested  by  its  power,  and 
brought  before  a  Court  to  plead  to  this  indictment.  He  is  tried  ;  a  second 
time,  she,  the  friendless,  comes  and  tells  the  tale  of  her  dishonor;  con 
fiding  justice,  humanity,  loving  and  honoring  men  believe  her  story ;  he  is 
convicted  and  attempts  to  fly  the  power  of  the  State  and  Union,  which 
is  by  that  child's  oath  already  set  in  motion,  and  will  prevail  against 
money  and  mobs  of  rescue,  all  of  these  cannot  save  the  big  criminal 
from  the  vengeance  of  the  law;  to  the  Penitentiary,  for  ten  long  years,  he 
must  and  does  go ;  yes,  the  merciful  majesty  of  the  law  shines  gloriously 
on  the  head  of  the  friendless  foreigner.  This  is  being  born  free  and  inde 
pendent  by  the  law  of  nature,  under  your  Constitution. 

But  not  so  of  the  poor  injured  slave,  man  or  woman,  native  born  though 
they  be,  however  cruel  or  terrible  the  wrong  inflicted  on  them,  by  their 
owner  or  other  free  man,  the  slave  is  not  to  be  heard  to  tell  his  or  her 
story,  however  true,  before  any  human  tribunal  in  the  land  against  a  free 
•white  person.  Is  this  being  free  and  independent  by  the  law  of  nature  ? 
Is  this  possessing  the  safety  and  happiness  described  in  the  first  Article 
of  the  New  Constitution,  which  your  organic  law  declares  to  be  the 
portion  of  all,  of  woman  born  ?  Slavery  imports  perpetual  obligation  to 
serve  another  !  Does  that  look  like  being  free  and  independent  ? 

Slavery,  said  MR.  S.,  is  so  abhorrent  to  all  justice  and  mercy,  that  all 
the  intendments  of  law  and  justice  are  opposed  to  it ;  so  that  the  legal 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  19 

writers  of  slave  countries  say  that  it  can  only  exist  by  force  of  positive 
law.  The  lex  scripta  must  be  its  foundation,  and  that  I  think  you  no 
longer  have.  The  lex  scripta  must  be  the  source  of  all  of  its  mischievous 
power,  which  one  human  being  can  exercise  over  another,  by  making  a 
fellow-being  his  slave,  his  chattel.  The  foundation  of  slavery  which 
sprang  up  in  our  colonies,  had,  as  a  general  rule,  nothing  but  the  barbar 
ous  custom  of  a  few  inhuman  planters,  in  its  origin,  which  custom  was 
one  within  legal  memory,  and  ran  not  back  to  that  imsurveyed  point  of 
antiquity,  transcending  ail  human  memory,  where  its  source  was  hidden 
in  the  night  of  byegone  ages.  It  has  not  that  common  law  authority  for 
its  support,  which  was  supposed  to  be  handed  down  from  generation  to 
generation,  in  th^  libraries  of  judges  and  lawyers,  as  copies,  as  some  con 
jecture,  of  obsolete,  worn-out  and  extinct  statutes.  As  the  soul  survives 
the  body,  so  it  is  supposed  these  customs  called  common  law,  are  the  souls 
or  spirits  of  departed  statutes,  the  tomb-stones  and  graves  of  which  can 
no  longer  be  found.  Cineres  perierunt.  But  their  imperishable  souls 
still  remain  to  guide  and  direct  us  on  the  journey  of  life,  and  as  far  as  they 
speak  in  the  language  of  authority  over  this  land,  they  forbid  in  trumpet- 
tongues,  the  existence  of  this  vile  institution  of  .slavery 

Institution  of  slavery.'  Institution  of  horse-stealing,  institution  of  gam 
bling,  and  the  i  isti-utions  of  highwaymen,  sound  equally  sensible,  to  a 
just  and  philosophical  thinker.  But  slavery  is  within  the  memory  of 
men,  so  far  as  its  advent  to  the  New  World  is  concerned.  We  track 
it  from  the  middle  passage  to  this  hour,  from  its  first  unholy  foot-print 
at  Jamestown  to  the  last  ones  made  this  day  by  those  now  held  in 
New  Jersey ;  and  if  the  Court  finds  a  well-grounded  doubt  as  to  the 
authority  for  this  institution  existing,  which  is  trying  to  nestle  down 
on  our  soil,  and  taking  rank  with  y  our  scientific,  religious  and  agricultural 
institutions,  then  give  humanity  the  advantage  of  that  doubt,  and  put  it 
to  death.  As  between  strength  and  weakness,  power  and  imbecility,  if  a 
strong  doubt  arise  in  the  minds  of  the  judges,  the  mercy  of  the  law  says, 
decide  in  favor  of  imbecility  and  weakness,  "  those  who  are  ready  to 
perish,"  let  their  blessing  come  upon  you.  Every  intendment  is  in  favor 
of  natural  rights,  until  the  contrary  doth  most  manifestly  appear.  If  the 
new  Constitution  has  seriously  drawn  in  question  the  villainies  and 
crimes  of  this  complicated  institution  of  wrong,  then  this  Court,  acting 
within  the  spirit  and  scope  of  American  institutions,  are  bound  to  give 
the  slave  the  benefit  of  that  doubt  and  set  him  free.  A  solid  doubt  should 
secure  emancipation.  But  thanks  to  the  freemen  of  New  Jersey,  the 
court  is  riot  obliged  to  look  through  clouds  to  see  the  clear  sky  of  Liberty 
beyond,  for  its  Constitution,  in  its  first  section,  asserts  in  the  strongest 
form  of  the  English  language,  the  explicit  principles  put  forth  in  the 
Declaration  of  Independence,  when  our  country  was  introduced  into  the 
family  of  nations,  by  which  we  declared  the  great  self-evident  truth  to  be, 
that  all  men  were  created  free  and  equal,  and  possessed  of  certain  inalien 
able  rights,  among  which  are  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness, 
which  is  the  proposition  of  the  Constitution  of  New  Jersey,  expressed  so 
distinctly,  that  cavil  itself  looks  on  in  humble  silence,  and  hangs  his  head 
in  mute 'despair.  For  these  great  man-rights,  said  MR.  S.,  as  I  have  said, 
there  is  no  buyer,  no  seller,  no  market.  They  are  a  trust  confided  to 
man,  by  his  Maker,  in  order  to  place  him  at  the  head  of  the  created  life, 
and  give  him  dominion  over  it;  and  his  rank  he  can  never  sell,  lose, 
or  forfeit,  so  as  to  take  his  station  as  property  among  the  quadrupeds 
and  animals.  In  the  fall  of  Adam  man  never  fell  so  low,  as  the  slave 
holder  would  have  wished;  for,  according  to  the  law  of  slavery,  the 
poor  slave  in  the  disastrous  fall  of  the  first  transgression  "which  brought 
death  into  the  world,  and  with  it  all  our  woes,"  the  slave  fell  out  of  his 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 


20 

manhood  into  chattel-hood,  and  fell  on  till  he  lost  his  wife,  his  children 
and  ni  the  amazing  descent  as  he  further  fell,  he  lost  all  his  property,' 
and  all  he  should  thereafter  acquire ;  and  as  he  further  fell,  he  him 
self  became  property,  and  brought  not  up  on  solid  ground,  until  he  could 
say  to  the  neighing  horse,  on  the  one  hand,  "  thou  art,  as  property,  my 
brother,"  and  to  the  lowing  ox,  on  the  other,  "thou  art  my  equal,  my 
peer."  Such  is  the  slaveholder's  fall,  but  this  is  one  of  man's  pit-falls,'  and 
not  one  of  his  Maker's.  Said  MR.  S. ,  he  had  an  argument,  which  the  Court 
might  regard  as  novel,  which  he  wished  to  urge— that  each  and  every 
branch  of  our  government,  state  or  national,  were  under  a  most  solemn 
covenant  with  one  of  the  great  nations  of  the  earth,  to  use  our  best 
endeavors  to  abolish  slavery,  in  every  part  of  our  country ;  and  we  have 
been  living  under  the  weight  of  that  solemn  arid  disregarded  undertaking 
for  the  last  thirty  years.  Said  MR.  S.,  I  understand  a  treaty  made  by  the 
treaty-making  power  to  be  the  solemn  and  paramount  law  of  this  land, 
I  am  right  in  its  construction,  the  duty  is  imposed  upon  our  nation 
I  may  well  urge  it  even  upon  the  judiciary  of  this  State,  as  a  co-ordi 
nate  branch  of  the  government,  to  employ  all  the  power  it  constitution 
ally  may  possess  by  its  decision,  to  fulfil  this  engagement  of  the  nation 

J  article,  said  MR.  S.,  to  which  I  refer,  is  the  10th  article  of  the 
treaty  of  Ghent,  of  the  24th  December,  1814,  made  by  the  United  States  of 
America  on  the  one  side,  and  his  Britannic  Majesty  on  the  other.  Lest 
there  should  be  some  attempt  to  cavil,  and  pretend  this  article  of  the 
:aty  had  reference  to  the  African  slave-trade,  I  may  be  allowed  to  say 
tere  is  not  one  word  in  the  treaty,  except  in  the  10th  article,  which 
touches  or  relates  to  the  subject  of  slavery,  and  it  is  an  enganment  re 
lating  to  slavery  as  to  the  traffic  generally  in  the  two  countries,  for  each  had 
abolished  the  African  slave-trade  under  the  most  tremendous  penalties 
long  before  1814 ;  therefore  the  treaty  referred  to  slavery  generally  in  the 
wo  countries.  The  words  of  Uie  10th  section  of  the  treaty  of  Ghent  are 

«  10th  Article,  Whereas  the  traffic  in  slaves  is  irreconcilable  with  the 
principles  of  humanity  and  justice,  and  whereas  both  his  Majesty,  and 
the  United  States  are  desirous  of  contributing  their  efforts  to  promote  its 
entire  abolition,  it  is  hereby  agreed  that,  both  the  contracting  parties  shall 
use  their  best  endeavors  to  accomplish  so  desirable  an  object." 
Signed  24th  December,  1814. 

"  GAMBIER, 
HENRY  GOULBURN, 
WILLIAM  ADAMS, 

(«  Done  m  triplicate.")  JOHN  QUINCY  ADAMS, 

J.  A.  BAYARD, 
H.  CLAY, 

JONATHAN  RUSSEL, 
ALBERT  GALLATIN." 
United  States  Laws,  1st  vol.,  699. 

This  treaty,  so  long  dishonored  on  our  part,  has  been  most  faithfully 
respected  and  obeyed  on  the  part  of  Great  Britain,  They  immediately 
began  to  adopt  means  for  the  subversion  of  slavery  as  a  svstem  in  the 
West  Indies.  To  be  sure  the  violence,  disorder,  and  Lynch-law  of  the 
slaveholders  of  the  West  Indies  defeated  the  kindness,  and  deferred  the 
approaching  justice  of  the  English  nation  for  some  years.  It  was  aston 
ishing  to  see  the  impudence  of  the  West  India  planters,  threatening  dis 
memberment  of  the  empire,  revolution,  and  treason,  as  often  as  the  mother 
country  originated  a  measure  in  any  degree  preparatory  to  emancipation. 
T-ese  contumacious  slaveholders  did  all  in  their  power  to  frighten 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  21 

England  from  her  high  purposes,  1st,  by  asserting  that  the  slaves  would 
cut  their  masters'  throats  if  emancipated ;  2d,  that  the  slaves  were  so 
brutified ,  they  would  all  starve  to  death,  and  die  from  laziness,  and  could  not 
take  care  of  themselves;  that  the  slaves  were  thieves  and  drunkards ;  that 
the  whites  would  have  to  abandon  the  Island  if  they  were  set  free,  and  lose 
their  estates ;  in  fact  that  slaves  were  not  men,  and  had  no  souls.  Amalga 
mation,  house-burning,  and  universal  desolation  would  be  the  first  fruits  of 
such  procedure. 

The  Moravian,  Baptist  and  Methodist  ministers  exposed  themselves  to 
great  rage  from  the  slaveholders  in  attempting,  as  Christian  ministers 
and  good  subjects,  to  preach  the  Gospel  to  the  slaves,  and  aid  them  in 
information  in  furthering  the  objects  of  the  mother  country.  Baptist  and 
Methodist  meeting-houses  or  churches  were  torn  down  and  burnt,  and 
these  blessed  ministers  were  in  constant  peril  of  losing  their  lives,  and 
were  occasionally  imprisoned  and  banished  from  their  homes  and  fami 
lies.  In  fact,  everything,  which  is  said  against  emancipation  and  aboli 
tionists  in  Mississippi,  Georgia,  and  South  Carolina,  was  said  in  the  British 
West-Indies  thousands  and  thousands  of  times  by  the  press,  resolutions  of 
public  meetings,  the  Island  Legislatures,  and  the  voice  of  man,  against 
emancipation  and  British  abolitionists ;  but  on  the  passage  of  the  great  Re 
form  Bill  of  England  in  1833,  about  500,000  new  law-makers  or  voters  were 
added  to  the  old  Parliamentary  constituency  of  England,  and  when  this 
fresh  stream  of  popular  power  flowed,  it  rose  so  high,  that  on  the  bosom 
of  its  flood  it  carried  into  the  New  Parliament  men  deeply  sympathizing 
with  the  great  principles  of  justice,  and  one  of  their  first  acts  of  legislation 
was  to  declare  slavery  abolished  in  the  West  Indies,  paying  £20,000,000 
sterling  to  the  slaveholders,  and  giving  them,  the  masters,  six  years 
more  of  the  services  of  the  slaves,  so  that  emancipation  would  not  take 
place  until  the  first  of  August,  1840.  This  apprenticeship-system,  regu 
lated  by  a  most  complicated  law,  with  especial  justices  to  stand  between 
master  and  apprentice,  proved,  impossible,  more  bitter  than  slavery  itself. 
Nothing  could  have  been  more  unfortunate,  or  fraught  with  greater  injus 
tice  to  the  colored  people. 

The  master's  avarice  and  cruelty  arose  in  proportion  to  the  shortness  of 
the  time  he  could  exercise  his  despotism.  The  special  justices  intended 
for  the  slave-apprentice's  friend,  eat  sumptuous  dinners  with  the  planter, 
and  decided  controversies  in  his  favor.  The  humanity  of  the  government 
in  the  apprenticeship  was  entirely  defeated  by  the  greediness,  cruelty, 
and  avarice  of  masters.  The  horrid  flogging,  the  treadmills,  and  other  in 
struments  of  slaveholding  vengeance  and  torture  were  in  full  play  during 
the  probationary  state.  The  mother  country  had  been  overreached  in  pay 
ing  twenty  millions  of  pounds  sterling  to  see  the  objects  of  their  solicitude 
so  shamefully  treated.  The  mistake  of  the  home  government  was  in 
supposing  it  .possible  to  engraft  a  system  of  apprenticeship,  education, 
and  a  preparation  for  freedom,  on  the  old  tree  of  slavery,  and  in  having 
confidence  in  those  brutal,  cruel,  and  avaricious  slaveholders,  who,  with 
their  twenty  millions  of  pounds,  and  six  years  of  labor,  only  hated  tho 
poor  slave  the  more  as  his  liberty  advanced  day  by  day  in  his  chains. 
Finally  in  January  or  February,  1838,  the  British  minister  wrote  to  the  Gov 
ernors  of  these  Islands,  requesting  them  in  the  coming  spring  and  sum 
mer  to  convoke  those  insular  legislatures  and  ask  them  forthwith  to 
abolish  the  remaining  two  years  of  the  apprenticeship  system,  if  the 
islands  wished  for  the  future  good  will  of  the  slaves,  or  in  fact,  the  pro 
tection  of  the  parent  country,  in  case  of  insurrection.  This  stringent 
measure  brought  the  obstinate  slaveholders  to  their  senses.  The  West  India 
Island  Parliaments  were  convoked,  and  the  final  acts  of  emancipation 
passed,  to  take  effect  simultaneously  on  the  1st  August,  1838,  except  the 


**  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

Island  of  Antigua,  whose  Parliament,  with  great  good  sense,  abolished 
slavery  and  apprenticeship  both,  in  1834,  in  an  island  of  30,000  blacks, 
and  5,000  whites — six  to  one.  Great  kindness,  love,  education,  and  pros 
perity  followed  this  island.  However,  the  eventful  first  of  August,  1838, 
at  last  came,  and  instead  of  blood  and  insurrection,  as  prophesied  by  the 
selfish  and  cowardly,  the  blacks  throughout  the  British  West  Indies,  to 
the  number  of  800,000  human  beings,  who  had  been  slaves,  met  in  the 
evening  of  the  31st  of  July,  1838,  and  there  continued  in  a  solemn  and 
quiet  manner  until  the  moment  of  midnight  came,  when  the  bells  of  the 
churches  of  the  British  West  Indies  struck  and  played  from  island  to 

island,  while  cannons  were  roaring  throughout  the  Great  Antilles they 

were  the  glorious  peals  of  freedom,  the  joyful  freedmen  raising  notes  of 
thanksgiving  and  praise  to  Heaven  from  bended  knees,  falling  with  hys 
teric  transports  of  wild  and  delirious  joy,  into  each  other's  arms.  No 
mortal  tongue  or  pen  can  describe  the  overflowing  ecstasies  of  these 

naked  and   scourged  bondmen,  now  standing  up  as  British  freemen 

slaves  no  more.     They  sung,  they  cried,  they  danced,  and  thus  in  wild 
and  rapturous  joy  they  passed  the  terrific  bourne  so  long  wished  for  by 
them — so  long  feared  .and  dreaded  by  the  guilty  white  man.     But  the 
first  drop  of  the  white  man's  blood  has  not  yet  been  shed,  by  these 
deeply  abused  and  emancipated  people.     Many  thousands  of  these  long- 
injured  people  are  now  proprietors  of  two,  four,  eight,  ten,  and  fifteen 
acres  of  land.     Their  wives  and  children  stay  at  home  and  cultivate  and 
raise  enough  for  the  family's  food  and  clothing;    the  father  works,  or 
some  older  sons,  on  some  neighboring  plantation, — the  money  he  or  they 
earn  pays  -for  land : — his  wife  and  children  create  subsistence  from  his 
own  fields.      Hundreds  of  schools,  and  many  colored   churches,  have 
sprung  up  for  the  adults  and  colored  children.     Once  the  planters  raised 
nothing  but  sugar,  molasses,  rum,  and  coffee,  and  bought  all  their  pro 
visions  from  abroad  ;  now  the  laborers' families  raise  their  provisions  on  the 
island.     Less  sugar,  to  be  sure,  is  raised,  but  two-thirds  of  the  sugar  goes, 
as  a  money  question,  farther  now  than  all  did  in  slavery,  as  more  than 
one-third,  sometimes  one  half,  was  spent  for  provisions  which  are  now 
raised  at  home.     So  they  have  gone  on  with  remarkable  prosperity,  both 
master  and  freedmen.     The  plantations  have  arisen,  some  twenty,"  thirty, 
and  others  forty  and  fifty,  and  many  sixty  and  sixty-five  per  cent,  above 
their  slave  value.     In  fact,  the  English  government  now  feel  that  they 
acted  unwisely  in  giving  the  twenty-millions  of  pounds,  for  the  lands 
alone  of  those  slave  islands  are  now'worth  more  than  slaves  and  land 
both  were  in  1830.     In  fact,  that  is  a  matter  of  regret  now,  that  the  slave 
had  not  received  what  England  had   to  give.     On  the  same   day,  the 
fetters  fell  from  the  slaves  of  South  Africa ;  from  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope, 
six-hundred  miles  north,  inland,  the  institution  expired  on  the  last  acre  of 
British  supremacy— from  ocean  to  ocean.     On  the    1st  of  April,    1844, 
England,  through  her  East  India  Company's  mighty  powers,  struck  slavery 
dead  through  her  Oriental  Regions— twelve  millions  of  slaves,  serfs,  and 
caste— crushed  beings,  lifted  their  unfettered  hands  to  God  to  bless  his 
power,  and  that  of  England's,  which,  amidst  a  population  of  one  hundred 
millions  of  Eastern  Indies,  left  them  in  chains  to  pine  no  more.     Has  not 
England  most  gloriously,  in  thirty  years,  from  1814  to  1844,  performed 
her  high  and  glorious  undertaking  with  these  United  States  in  the  treaty 
of  Ghent?     Has  she  not  blotted  out.  that  great  dishonor  of  our  rnce  from 
her  vast  dominions  ?    What  have  we  done  to  fulfil  our  part  of  this  ffreat 
national  covenant  ?    When  the  abolitionists  presented  from  vear  to  year, 
petitions  clothed  in  dignified  and  respectful  language,  praying  Congress 
to  abolish  the  internal  slave  trade  between  the  States,  in  the  Territory  of 
Florida,  and  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  signed  by  tens  of  thousands  of 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  23 

names,  unread,  nndebated,  imprinted,  and  unconsidered,  they  were  laid 
tipon  die  table.  This  being  esteemed  too  great  a  privilege  for  humanity, 
•during  throe  years,  these  petitions,  by  a  rule  of  the  House  of  Representa 
tives,  were  forbidden  a  reception  by  the  House.  The  abolitionists,  for 
endeavoring  to  fulfil  the  paramount  law  of  the  land,  the  10th  Article  of 
the  treaty,  were  defamed  in  Congress  and  out,  their  names  cast  out  as 
fanatical  and  incendiary,  they  were  mobbed  by  the  countenance  of  men 
in  high  places,  their  churches  destroyed,  their  halls  burnt,  and  their  people 
imprisoned  and  murdered !  If  slavery  not  only  forbids  and  restrains  a 
nation  from  performing  its  most  solemn  treaties,  but  violates  them,  and 
thus  endangers  the  peace,  prosperity,  and  happiness  of  the  whole  people, 
•can  it  be  doubted  that  it  contravenes  the  1st  Article  of  your  Constitution, 
which  assures  us  that  man  has  the  right  of  "  acquiring,  possessing,  and 
protecting  property,  and  of  pursuing,  and  of  obtaining  safety  and  happiness." 

Can  safety,  property  and  happiness  be  maintained  by  men  or  nations 
who  violate  faith,  who  are  .truce  breakers?  Is  not  that  slavery  which 
hazards  the  peace  of  a  Nation  by  refusing  obedience  to  the  highest  law 
of  individual  and  national  preservation,  something  that  is  contrary  to  the 
great  law  of  nature?  Every  branch  of  our  government — legislative,  ju 
dicial  or  Executive — should  have  lent  every  encouragement  and  aid  in 
their  power  to  the  removal  of  this  cancer,  battening  with  its  roots  in  the 
jugulars  of  the  Republic.  But  instead  of  Presidential  and  gubernatorial 
messages  urging  Congress  and  the  State  Legislatures,  under  this  standing 
paramount  treaty-law,  to  do  all  in  their  power  within  their  respective 
jurisdictions  to  abolish  slavery,  slavery  has  mounted  the  highest  places 
of  power,  and  has  rescinded  and  annulled  the  treaty,  and  compelled 
Presidents  and  Governors  by  messages  and  inaugurals  to  forewarn  the 
Legislative  Assemblies  and  the  people  to  violate  this  treaty,  and  turn  their 
entire  power  and  legislative  action  against  those  who  had  petitioned  for 
the  abolition  of  slavery.  Is  riot  this  high  treason  against  the  State  and 
man's  best  interests  ?  Has  not  slavery  caused  these  high  dignitaries  to 
commit  official  perjury  ?  And  is  not  such  a  terrible  institution  hostile  to 
man,  his  safety  and  happiness  as  a  man  and  as  a  citizen,  and  is  it  not 
within  the  inhibition  of  the  first  section  of  your  Constitution,  and  does  it 
not  violate  that  freedom  and  independence  conferred  upon  him  by  the 
law  of  nature,  and  does  it  not  stand  between  you  and  the  enjoyment  of 
the  first  article  ? 

What  is  that  law  of  nature,  by  which  all  men  are  made  free  and  inde 
pendent  ?  Allow  me  to  define  it  as  I  understand  it,  said  MR.  S.  The  law  of 
nature  is  that  great  Omnipotent  law  of  God,  ever  in  full  force  amidst  the 
busy  hum<Qf  thousands  in  your  emporium,  or  in  the  solitudes  of  the  wilder 
ness,  on  the  sea,  or  on  the  land  ;  it  follows  man  down  into  the  mines  of  the 
earth,  it  ascends  with  him  to  the  Chimborazo's  top  ;  it  has  no  latitude,  no 
longitude,  no  length,  no  breadth ;  it  is  truth,  and  is  as  earnest  in  its  plead 
ings,  amidst  the  inhospitalities  of  polar  cold,  as  in  the  boundless  prodi 
galities  of  the  burning  tropics  ;  it  is  the  everlasting  justice  and  mercy  of 
the  Eternal ;  it  is  the  great  imprint  of  God  upon  rnan,  which  can  never  be 
counterfeited,  erased,  or  repealed ;  it  is  so  immutable  that  it  never 
changes,  man  cannot  repeal  it;  it  is  a  part  of  each  human  being's  inherit 
ance,  which  without  crime  he  can  never  spend  or  squander ;  it  abides 
with  him,  though  unhonored,  under  all  circumstances  of  bereavement, 
and  guarantees  man's  right  to  life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness  as 
inalienable. 

The  law  of  nature  is  taken  up  and  recognized  by  the  good  people  of 
New  Jersey,  in  the  most  solemn  form  as  a  rule  of  action,  in  her  organic 
law.  This  first  section  declares  that  amongst  mail's  unalienable  rights 


24 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 


are  life,  liberty,  and  the  right  of  acquiring  property.  What,  can  a  slave 
have  safety,  or  acquire  property  ?  he  who  is  nothing  but  a  chattel,  a  piece 
of  property  himself,  can  he  acquire  safety  ?  No ;  of  all  the  innumerable 
murders  committed  by  white  men  and  women  upon  the  slaves  of  the 
south  (and  there  is  no  day  goes  by  in  which  there  is  not  more  than  one 
murder  in  each  slave  State,  on  an  average),  not  a  single  white  person  has 
yet  been  executed  for  the  murder  of  the  colored  man.  The  white  is 
frequently  hung  in  the  slave  States  for  stealing  slaves,  but  not  for  killing 
them.  Oh,  sum  of  all  human  villanies,  let  the  curse  of  God  rest  upon  it, 
let  every  wind  of  Heaven  be  charged  with  its  destruction,  every  rising 
sun  be  its  destroyer,  the  rolling  seasons  its  executioner!! 

Said  MR.  S.,  slavery  is  the  exact  converse  of  every  proposition  contained 
in  the  first  article  of  your  new  Constitution. 

Slavery  throws  down  every  human  right  in  the  market  to  the  highest 
bidder.  If  slavery  or  semi-slavery,  in  the  shape  of  children  of  slaves  in 
this  State  continuing  to  be  slaves,  males  until  twenty-five,  and  females 
until  twenty-one  years  of  age,  and  this  operation  is  to  pass  under  the 
name  of  being  born  free,  and  persons  forty-one  years  old  and  upwards  to 
be  retained  as  slaves  for  life,  and  slaveholders  are  to  stand  asserting 
their  wicked  power,  then  the  first  great  section  of  your  Constitution  is 
converted  into  a  vapid  and  senseless  abstraction.  Shall  your  Constitution 
be  withered  by  the  power  of  slavery  ?  Shall  this  Constitution  stand  gilt 
with  the  gold  of  high  pretension,  while  within  it  is  full  of  ravening  and 
dead  men's  bones  ?  Shall  this  slave  institution  continue  to  exist  in  hos 
tility  to  so  plain  a  provision  ?  This  frightful  institution  claims  to  exist 
by  the  apology  of  some  since  the  2d  of  last  September,  even  since  this 
Constitution  went  into  operation,  without  a  platform  on  which  to  place 
its  accursed  feet.  Said  MR.  S.,  the  best  foundation  I  can  see  for  slavery 
in  this  State,  at  this  time,  and  the  length  of  time  it  should  continue, 
should  be  the  amount  of  time  it  would  take  the  people  of  this  State  to 
recover  from  their  astonishment  at  its  inexpressible  impudence. 

The  institution  of  slavery  is  the  converse  proposition  of  the  Ten  Com 
mandments,  the  essence  of  injustice  and  meanness  in  its  most  compact 
form ;  and  it  would  seem  that  no  nation  not  struck  down  by  a  mortal 
paralysis,  would  wait  a  moment  before  rising  and  striking  down  the 
monster,  the  first  instant  they  discovered  his  seven  heads  and  ten  horns 
emerging  from  the  forlorn  regions  of  "  Eldest  Hell." 

Said  MR.  S.,  which  shall  stand — the  great  written,  organic  law  of  liberty, 
or  the  unwritten  and  inexpressible  villany  of  slavery  ?  Which  shall 
stand— the  natural  God-inherited  rights  of  life,  liberty,  property,  safety 
and  happiness  for  each  human  being  in  New  Jersey,  or  that  of  an  insti 
tution  which  subverts  every  object  for  which  a  good  Constitution  was 
ever  made  ? 

A  Constitution  ex  vi  termini  imports  a  covenant  made  by  the  whole 
people,  with  each  person,  and  each  person  with  the  whole  people,  to 
protect  and  defend  their  God-inherited  rights  of  life,  liberty,  property  and 
safety  from  violence  and  invasion.  A  Constitution  is  made  for  the 
defence  of  human  rights  and  not  for  the  destruction ;  a  Constitution  is 
the  highest  evidence  of  man's  weakness;  and  to  combine  society's 
strength,  for  the  defence  of  each  individual.  How  is  it  possible  that 
a  Constitution,  whether  of  this  State,  or  of  the  United  States,  which 
were  created  on  purpose  for  the  protection  of  life,  liberty,  property  and 
Safety,  can  exist  and  be  entitled  to  the  name,  without  overthrowing 
every  institution  villany  or  stratagem  created  or  made,  intending  to  cheat 
man  out  of  life,  liberty,  property,  safety  and  happiness? 
The  men  who  framed  the  old  State  Constitution  of  New  Jersey  in  the 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  25 

year  1776  were  not  such  hypocrites  as  to  stamp  that  Constitution  with 
the  protection  of  human  rights.  No,  they  said  nothing  on  that  subject, 
for  they  knew  there  were  no  inconsiderable  class  of  the  population  of 
this  State,  who  were  wedded  to  the  insatiable  desire  of  appropriating  the 
labor  of  others,  without  compensation,  by  compelling  negroes,  mulattoes, 
mestees  and  Indians,  to  work  for  them  for  nothing,  and  make  chattels  or 
property  of  their  persons,  their  wives  and  children, — yes,  of  those  human 
sinews  as  a  marketable  commodity,  men  were  to  be  degraded  and  for 
bidden,  under  penalties  of  thirty-nine  lashes,  from  wandering  from  their 
masters'  homes  on  Sunday,  for  the  infliction  of  which  stripes,  by  the 
order  of  a  justice  of  the  peace,  a  constable  did  and  yet  does  receive  from 
the  master  the  sum  of  $1  for  performing  the  brutish  service.  To  add  to 
all  other  ignoble  acts  on  the  part  of  the  State,  was  a  provision  forbidding 
emancipation  of  the  slave,  if  forty  years  old  or  more,  for  fear  of  the  dis 
tant  contingency,  that  this  freedman  might  become  a  public  burthen  to  the 
township,  by  being,  a  pauper  in  his  old  age,  and  rather  than  subject  the 
towns  to  that  they  preferred  to  let  the  man  and  his  posterity  remain  in 
slavery.  Such  was  the  gross  inhumanity  of  the  age ;  thus  cheap  were 
human  rights  held  by  the  people  of  this  State  at  large.  Gross  inhumanity 
to  the  master  himself;  it  took  away  his  locus  penitentia,  his  space  of 
repentance.  And  if  slavery  is  not  abolished,  this  infamous  provision  is 
still  in  full  force.  The  reason,  said  MR.  S.,  why  slavery  was  not  abolish 
ed  by  name  in  Massachusetts  and  New  Jersey  is  to  be  found  in  this,  that 
the  conscious  shame  of  the  fact  restrained  the  framers  of  those  Constitu 
tions  from  immortalising  their  own  disgrace  by  admitting  slavery's  pre 
vious  existence,  in  and  by  its  distinct  abolition.  They  therefore  put  it  to 
death  by  suffocation  by  the  hands  of  liberty,  without  a  name,  hoping  the 
judiciaries  would  attend  its  funeral  and  burial,  and  for  ever  remove  its 
unsightly  corpse  from  the  sight  and  smell  of  men  with  as  little  parade  as 
possible  ;  and  further  hoping  a  generous  posterity  would  disbelieve  their 
early  public  history,  and  consider  it  as  apocryphal  and  slanderous  of  their 
illustrious  ancestors,  as  the  Constitutions  of  these  States  do  not  so  much 
as  name  so  great  a  moral  blemish  on  their  historical  fame. 

Said  MR.  S.,  by  the  statute  of  this  State  (which  he  coajended  was  re 
pealed  by  the  Is't  section  of  the  new  Constitution)  passed  February,  1820, 
all  children  born  of  slaves  after  1804  were  to  be  free,  but  belong  as  ser 
vants,  and  be  held  as  apprentices,  who  are  bound  oat  by  the  overseers  of 
the  poor  to  the  owners  of  their  mothers,  their  administrators,  executors 
and  assigns,  males  till  25,  and  females  until  21.  These  persons  were  pro 
perty  in  every  sense  of  the  word,  until  their  time  expired ;  they  are  pur 
chased  and  sold  in  private  and  at  public  auction,  pass  under  the  insolvent 
acts  and  bankrupt  acts,  the  same  as  oxen  and  horses.  What  is  the  differ 
ence  between  this  Mary  Tebout  and  her  mother  ?  Nothing,  until  Mary  has 
passed  21  years  of  unrewarded  toil.  She  is  called  a  servant,  she  is"  said 
to  be  born  free,  now  but  19,  and  has  been  sold  three  times.  The  South 
ern  States  call  slavery  involuntary  servitude,  or  persons  bound  to  service 
by  the  laws  of  the  States.  The  domestic  institutions  of  the  South,  the  patri- 
archial  institutions  and  the  peculiar  institutions  of  the  South — by  such  soft 
hypocritical  use  of  words,  do  they  mean  to  make  the  English  language  a 
partner  in  their  guilt,  by  using  it  as  a  cloak  to  conceal  the  hideous  visage 
of  that  frightful  monster,  whose  mouth  is  filled  with  spikes,  and  cover  her 
face  with  iron  wrinkles,  with  burning  balls  of  fire  for  eyes,  whose  every 
hair  is  a  hissing  serpent,  whose  fetid  breath  would  kill  the  Bahon  Upas, 
whose  touch  is  ruin,  whose  embrace  is  destruction,  who  is  fed  on  blood, 
tears  and  sweat,  whip-extracted,  from  unpaid  toil — her  music  is  unpitied 
groans  of  broken  hearts,  of  ruined  hopes.,  and  blasted  expectations. 

Away,  said  MR.  S.,  with  such  artifice  to  shield  deformity,  by  those 


26  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

cruel  and  wicked  States,  boasting  of  their  republicanism,  and  rights  of 
man.  Kven  New  York  and  Pennsylvania  once  held  persons  born  free, 
whose  mothers  were  slaves,  the  males  till  28,  and  females  till  25,  as  slaves! 
Terrible  nick-naming  of  human  rights,  as  in  bold  derision  of  iliem.  These 
New  Jersey  servants  are  property,  in  its  base  sense,  slaves  for  years,  the 
parents  deprived  of  all  jurisdiction  of  their  offspring,  all  direction  of  their 
education,  and  parernal  tenderness ;  the  law  confining  these  poor  servants 
and  obliging  them  to  live  with  those  who  have  owned  and  abused  the 
mother  who  bore  them,  and  are  still  continuing  to  hold  their  parents  until 
death  as  slaves.  The  master  can  sell  this  servant  and  horse  together 
This  servant-woman  at  15,  and  the  male-servant  at  18,  contract  marriage^ 
and  when  the  woman  is  19,  and  man  22  years  of  age,  having  three  little* 
children,  the  father  is  sold  to  one  end  of  the  State,  and  the  mother  to  the 
other;  their  little  children  left  in  the  street,  the  marriage  relation  broken, 
the  paternal  and  maternal  relation  dissolved  ;  these  little  ones  not  to  see 
their  parents  for  two  years  or  more  ;  the  husband  cannot  see  his  wife  or 
little  ones,  nor  the  wife  her  husband  or  babies  for  two  years  to  come.  Call 
you  this  being  born  free  ?  The  man  is  deprived  of  his  wife,  arid  the  wife 
becomes  a  widow,  and  children  orphans,  according  to  law,  to  satisfv  the 


by  which  we  are  born  free  and  independent.  We  can  never  honor  or 
respect  the  new  Constitution,  till  we  feel  there  is  meaning,  power,  vitalitv, 
in  those  blessed  words  of  justice,  truth,  mercy,  freedom,  safety;  and 
further,  feel  that  there  are  no  birth-impediments,  or  interest  of  others  in 
the  use  of  our  bodies,  inconsistent  with  our  own  happiness.  Each  indi 
vidual  should  be  left  to  fulfil  the  object  of  his  mission  to  this  world  in  the 
best  way  he  may;  society  should  not  load  him  with  burdens  for  the 
benefit  of  others,  but  should  give  him  every  facility  to  run  his  race  of 
existence,  with  dignity  to  himself,  and  thus  truly  serve  the  ends  of  society 
and  his  own  creation,  in  passing  from  the  great  eternity  of  the  past  into 
the  illimitable  future.  Here,  MR.  S.  said,  we  are  not  left  in  the  dark,  as 
to  the  meaning  of  the  words  of  the  New.  Jersey  new  Constitution,  for  it  is 
almost  an  exact  copy  of  the  first  section  of  the  Massachusetts  Constitu 
tion  of  1780.  Here  MR.  S.  read  the  first  section  of  the  Massachusetts  Con 
stitution  in  these  words. 

"Article  1st.  All  men  are  born  free  and  equal,  and  have  certain 
natural,  essential,  and  inalienable  rights,  among  which  may  be  reckoned 
the  right  of  enjoying  and  defending  their  lives  and  liberties;  that  of  ac 
quiring,  possessing,  arid  protecting  property  ;  in  fine,  that  of  seeking  and 
obtaining  their  safety  and  happiness." 

Here  MR.  S.  asked  MR.  ZABRISKIE,  counsel  for  the  claimant  of  Marv 
Tebout,  if  he  contended  there  was  any  difference  l>etween  the  two  sec 
tions  of  these  Constitutions  ?  MR.  ZABRISKIE  replied,  he  did  not. 

The  New  Jersey  Constitution  has  in  the  10th  Article  these  words,  "The 
common  law  and  statute  laws  now  in  full  force,  not  repugnant  to  this 
Constitution,  shall  remain  in  force  until  they  expire  by  their  own  limita 
tion,  or  be  altered  or  repealed  by  the  Legislature." 

Further,  MR.  S.  said  that  he  relied  on  a  portion  of  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  for  emancipation,  by  this  Honorable  Court,  to  wit,  the 
Magna  Charta  portion,  where  it  asserts  "  that  no  person  shall  be  deprived 
of  life,  liberty  or  property,  without  due  process  of  law." 

MR.  S.  said  that  the  case  of  Winchendon  v.  Hatficld,  4th  Mat*.  Rep..  123, 
is  the  case  of  one  Kdoin  Landon,  in  relation  to  the  question  as  to  which 
of  the  towns  should  support  him,  he  having  been  a  slave  in  Massachusetts, 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  27 

and  sold  eleven  times,  enlisted  twice  in  the  Revolutionary  army,  the 
second  time  for  three  years,  his  master  receiving  his  bounty  and  his  wages, 

also,  4th  Mi**.,  539.  Chief  Justice  Parsons  decided  in  this  cause  that 

slavery  had  been  abolished  by  the  first  section  of  the  Massachusetts  Con 
stitution,  as  had  been  decided  in  formerly  unreported  cases.  This  is 
legal  authority,  in  effect,  on  the  very  words  of  the  New  Jersey  Constitu 
tion,  1st  article ;  Massachusetts  being  the  same  in  substance,  as  admitted. 
Need  I  say  Massachusetts  has  shed  from  the  lamp  of  her  Judiciary  as 
pure,  bright  and  steady  a  light  as  any  Court  in  the  new  world,  and  "has 
done  her  fair  share  in  elevating  the  science  of  the  law.  I  repose  with 
great  confidence  upon  this  authority;  it  covers  the  whole  controversy. 

The  case  of  the  slave — Mei.  18th  Pickering,  193,  known  under  the 
name  of  Commonwealth  vs.  Thomas  Aves,  presented  within  the  last  half 
dozen  years  this  same  great  question  collaterally.  The  argument  was 
elaborate,  and  opinion  of  Chief  Justice  Shaw  luminous. 

The  Chief  Justice  Shaw  says,  Massachusets  in  1641  abolished  slavery, 
except  of  captives  taken  in  lawful  war  or  guilty  of  crime.  But  slavery  grew 
up  in  Massachusetts,  and  in  1703  an  act  was  passed  in  that  colony,  imposing 
restrictions  on  the  transmission  of  aged  and  infirm  slaves ;  and  by  an  act 
of  1705,  a  duty  was  levied  on  the  importation  of  slaves,  showing  slavery 
in  full  force  until  abolished  by  their  Constitution  of  1780.  The  Chief 
Justice,  in  this  case,  says  it  is  now  well  established  law  that  slavery  was 
abolished  by  the  Constitution  of  1780,  and  before  the  adoption  of  the  Con 
stitution  of  tne  United  States,  slavery  being  repugnant  to  the  principles  of 
justice,  of  nature,  and  the  declaration  of  rights,  which  are  a  component 
part  of  the  Constitution  of  Massachusetts.  Slavery,  said  he,  crept  into 
Massachusetts  by  force  of  custom  existing  in  the  West  Indies  and  in  several 
other  States,  encouraged  by  the  mother  country  (miserable  apology  better 
than  none,  even  in  Massachusetts). 

Chief  Justice  Shaw  says, "  Slavery  is  a  relation  founded  in  force  and  .not 
in  right ;  existing  where  it  does  by  force  of  positive  law,  and  not  recog 
nized  and  founded  in  natural  rights."  Slavery,  he  says,  "  is  contrary  to 
natural  risrhts,  to  the  principles  of  justice  and  humanity."  He  then  says, 
"  Bond  slavery  cannot  exist  in  this  Commonwealth,  because  it  is  contrary 
to  natural  right,  repugnant  to  the  Constitution  and  law,  designed  to  secure 
the  liberty  and  rights  of  all  persons  who  come  within  the  limits  of  this 
State,  as  entitled  to  the  protection  of  law." 

But  what  case  can  I  have  stronger  than  the  opinion  of  Chief  Justice 
Marshall,  himself  a  slaveholder  ?  Borne  down  by  slaveholding  construction 
as  hs  was,  still  his  innate  integrity  triumphed  over  cultivated  wrong,  and 
compelled  him  to  define  slavery  as  contrary  to  the  law  of  nature,  for  the 
definition  of  slavery  by  the  civil  law,  showed  it  an  institution  contrary  to 
the  law  of  nature,  which  law  of  nature  New  Jersey  has  adopted.  In 
case  of  the  Antelope,  10th  Wheaton,  120,  the  Chief  Justice  Marshall  says, 
"  That  slavery  is  contrary  to  the  law  of  nature  will  scarcely  be  denied ; 
that  every  man  has  a  natural  right  to  the  fruits  of  his  own  labor  is  gene 
rally  admitted,  and  that  no  other  person  can  rightfully  deprive  him  of 
those  fruits  and  appropriate  them  against  his  will,  seems  the  necessary 
result  of  that  admission  "  Chief  Justice  Marshall  quotes  the  definition 
of  slavery  in  the  Latin  from  the  civil  law,  which,  with  his  own  opinion, 
would  seem  to  put  the  question  in  this  cause  for  ever  to  rest.  It  is  this, 
"  Servitus  est  comtitutio  juris  gentium  qua  quis  Domino  alieno  CONTRA  NATU- 
RAM  subjicitur."  Slavery  is  an  institution  by  the  laws  of  Nations,  by  which 
one  is  subjected  to  another  man,  as  master,  contrary  to  nature.  Slavery  strikes 
down  and  repeals,  if  it  could,  the  law  of  nature  referred  to  in  the  1st  article 
of  your  Constitution ;  what  can  be  stronger  and  more  complete  ?  said 


28  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

MR.  S.     Here  MR.  STEWART  gave  way  for  an  adjournment  until  3  P.  M. 
for  dining. 

The  court  being  present  at  3  o'clock,  P.  M.,  MR.  STEWART  resumed  by 
saying,  Has  any  lawyer  the  courage  to  say  that  the  legislature  of  New- 
Jersey  could  create  the  institution  of  slavery  to  day  in  defiance  of 
the  new  constitution  ?  Perhaps  most,  if  not  all,  would  say  No.  Why 
could  not  the  legislature  enact  such  a  law  so  as  to  create  the  relation  of 
slave  and  master  ?  It  would  be  correctly  answered,  and  would  be  by  all, 
it  would  be  repugnant  to  the  new  Constitution  and  its  first  section.  Do 
not  we  discover  that  a  law  sustaining  slavery  is  equally  repugnant  to  the 
new  Constitution,  whether  passed  ten  years  before  it,  or  ten  years  after  it  ? 
and  that  the  repugnance  is  not  a  question  of  past  or  present  time  ?  If  it 
is  repugnant,  it  is  equally  so  in  the  one  case  as  the  other,—"  it  is  so  odious 
nothing  but  positive  law  can  sustain  it,"  says  Lord  Mansfield. 

MR.  S.  said  that  he  confessed  himself  to  have  much  respect  for  a  bein% 
so  highly  honored  as  man  by  his  Maker,  a  being  created  in  the  image  of 
God,  who  showed  at  all  times  the  grandeur  of  his  descent,  and  the  illus- 
triousness  of  his  lineage  by  that  great  unimpeachable  record  written 
upon  his  countenance  sublime,  by  the  finger  of  God,  which  no  poverty, 
sorrow,  or  crime,  could  erase:  its  marks  of  origin  were  open  to  all,  read 
of  all,  and  should  be  comprehended  by  all.  In  the  first  place  we  must 
look  at  the  immense  natural  wealth,  or  God-given  possessions,  which  be 
long  to  the  meanest  man,  who  prints  the  green  earth,  with  his  foot,  or 
drinks  from  its  waters,  and  renews  life  every  moment  from  the  unbought 
atmosphere— is  fanned  by  the  wings  of  the  wind,  cheered  with  the  eye- 
possession  of  the  universe ;  yes,  his  every-day  existence  could  not  be 
sustained,  at  a  less  expense  than  the  fitting  up  of  two  worlds,  for  his  ac 
commodation,  the  earth  and  sun ;  the  bread  he  eats,  the  wool,  the  flax, 
and  cotton  he  wears,  is  warmed  into  life  by  rays  of  light  from  the  sun, 
sent  over  ninety  millions  of  miles  in  profusion,  without  stint,  each  ray 
having  its  definite  office  and  distinct  commission  to  aid  to  life,  strength 
and  joy,  a  single  human  being.  If  there  were  but  one  man  on  this 
globe,  these  vast  structures  of  two  worlds  must  be  reared  in  all  their  archi 
tectural  grandeur  and  fitness.  This  globe  must  revolve  around  on  its 
own  axis  every  twenty-four  hours,  and  shoot  along  upon  the  vast  plane 
of  the  ecliptic,  at  the  inconceivable  rate  of  sixty-eight  thousand  miles  per 
hour.  Man  perishes,  if  the  globe  were  to  revolve  around  the  sun  at  the  rate 
of  thirty-four  thousand  miles  per  hour ;  man  could  not  live  in  these  regions 
with  a  year  of  seven  hundred  and  thirty  days,  with  the  unbroken  severities 
of  a  double  winter,  or  the  scorching  heat  of  a  protracted  summer. 

The  outlay  of  Almighty  power,  which  sends  this  noble  earth  careering 
round  the  sun  with  such  prodigious  force,  and  brings  it  back  to  the  same 
point,  in  absolute  space  with  infinite  precision,  with  the  punctuality  of 
God,  is  a  portion  of  each  man's  inheritance;  and  all  the  powers  ever 
displayed  by  man,  exerted  by  beasts,  felt  from  winds,  or  overwhelmed 
by  tornadoes,  or  moved  in  tempests,  or  lifted  or  sunk  by  earthquakes, 
swept  by  tides,  or  driven  by  inundations,  put  forth  since  the  morn 
ing  of  creation,  would  not  furnish  a  sufficient  force,  to  propel  our  globe 
on  its  everlasting  journey,  a  single  day.  Yet  for  man  these  high  demon 
strations  are  made,  to  fit  him  up  an  abode  with  the  finish  of  Omnipotence, 
commensurate  with  his  every  want,  it  is  his  God-inherited  estate ;  and 
were  the  poorest  man  on  earth  to  exchange  that  estate,  for  the  power  of 
Boiuiparte,  when  all  Europe  shook  beneath  his  tread,  and  trembled  at  his 
power,  this  poor  man  would  be  undone,  by  the  exchange  ;  the  property  is 
too  great  for  any  one  to  buy  it,  of  another ;  this  is  the  benevolence  of 
Heaven  to  his  honored  creature,  man.  When  each  man's  God-inherited 
estate  is  reckoned  and  computed,  though  possessing  nothing  else,  and  com- 


SLAVERY    IN   NEW   JERSEY.  29 

pared  with  that  of  any  other  man's  God-inherited  estate,  they  are 
equal ;  and  if  one  possess  a  million  of  pounds,  and  the  other  no  money, 
still  when  their  whole  possessions  are  considered,  one  has  one  hundred 
and  the  other  but  one  hundred  and  one.  This  proposition  or  statement 
will  for  ever  vindicate  the  goodness  of  Heaven,  and  show  the  absolute, 
equality  of  all  men,  if  considered  possession- wise. 

Therefore  it  seems  to  me,  said  MR.  S.,  the  Declaration  of  Independence, 
in  asserting,  that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,  istrue  as  a  proposi 
tion,  and  is  not  a  rhetorical  flourish,  but  a  sublime  estimate,  no  less  grand 
than  true,  when  we  refer  to  the  vast  possessions  of  each  human  being  ; 
and  that  any  accidental  variance  by  the  acquisitions  of  one,  of  more  wealth 
than  another,  does  not  disturb  the  great  result  any  more  than  the  dust 
which  may  fall  upon  one  of  the  scales  shall  change  their  general  equipoise. 

All  men  are  created  equal,  and  shall  a  being  of  such  amazing  dignity  and 
immense  possessions,  of  such  grand  lineage,  be  made  a  slave  ?  God 
forbid.  Equality,  life,  liberty  of  locomotion,  the  rights  of  acquiring  hap 
piness  in  every  way  we  see  fit,  not  violating  the  rights  of  our  brother 
man,  or  the  edicts  of  Heaven,  with  the  God-inherited  estate,  constitute 
what  your  constitution  and  that  of  Massachusetts  and  the  Declaration  of 
Independence,  describe  as  rights  inalienable.  Is  it  not  so  ?  What  kind 
of  a  deed,  said  MR.  S.,  must  that  be  which  should  attempt  to  convey  my 
right  and  title  in  the  wind,  atmosphere,  earth,  and  my  share  in  the 
power  that  propels  this  ponderous  globe  around  the  sun  ?— my  title  to  the 
exhaustless  fires  and  light  of  that  great  luminary,  and  of  those  rays  which 
might  fall  on  me  or  on  the  earth  and  produce  my  raiment  and  food  ?  Is 
there  not  deep  and  philosophical  truth  in  asserting  the  inalienability  of 
rights  like  these,  so  essential  to  man's  existence,  and  his  everlasting  ac 
countability,  to  the  Father  of  all,  for  his  abounding  munificence,  with  which 
man  can  invest  no  other  being,  or  divest  himself.  Can  it  not  truly  be 
said  that  a  being  \vho  is  born  to  such  great  possessions,  is  born  free  and 
independent  ?  The  greatest  blot  on  American  character  is,  to  have  been 
deluded  by  slaveholders  into  a  belief  that  those  great  words  expressed  by 
the  men,  who  wrote  and  adopted  the  Declaration  of  our  Independence, 
were  mere  abstractions  ,and  the  flourish  of  oratory,  where  they  declared 
the  great  self-evident  truth  "  that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,  and  are 
possessed  of  certain  inalienable  rights,  among  which  are  life,  liberty,  and 
the  pursuit  of  happiness,"  and  that  the  same  were  meaningless.  These 
truths  are  self-evident,  and  why  ?  said  MR.  S.  They  are  evident  in  every 
breath  of  air  we  respire  through  our  lungs,  every  step  we  take,  in  every 
object  we  behold  printed  on  every  tree,  written  on  every  cloud,  bursting 
forth  in  every  falling  drop  of  rain,  reflected  in  every  ray  of  light,  by  which 
the  universe  is  warmed,  and  in  glory  lit  up,  and  by  the  succession  of  day 
and  night,  summer  and  winter,  seed-time  and  harvest,  in  fact,  its  self-evi 
dence  is  stereotyped  in  eternal  beauty  upon  the  earth,  the  sea,  the  moun 
tain,  the  valley,  upon  the  moon,  the  sun,  and  stars  of  heaven.  This  con 
stitutes  the  great  record  of  ever-during  self-evidence,  that  all  men  are  creat 
ed  free  and  equal,  and  are  possessed  of  certain  inalienable  rights,  &c. 

Said  MR.  S.,  this  rises  to  a  moral,  if  not  a  mathematical  demonstration, 
and  that  a  great  nation  should,  so  far  as  individuals,  forget  the  dignity  of 
their  origin,  the  vastness  of  their  inalienable  possessions,  and  should  hunt 
for  arguments  to  force  their  debasement  and  search  for  reasons  to  under 
value  such  a  being  as  man,  especially  in  a  great  selfocracy,  where  each 
man  is  a  sovereign,  is  among  all  strange  things,  one  which  would  exceed 
belief  were  we  not  met  by  the  strange  phenomenon  at  every  turn  of  hu 
man  affairs.  Had  we  incorporated  the  Divine  sentiments  of  our  great  De 
claration  into  our  minds,  as  an  everlasting  first-principle,  and  lived  under 
the  sway  of  its  glorious  dominion,  no  slavery  would  then  have  disgraced 


30  SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY. 

ornMnagnificent  country  ;  no  half  cultivated,  forlorn  and  deserted  sections 
of  Slave  States,  would  have  told  the  world  their  melancholy  tale.  No 
cofflcd  gang  of  slaves  would  have  dishonored  our  nation,  driven  from 
State  to  State,  for  sale.  No,  our  prosperity,  riches,  glory  and  moral  eleva 
tion,  would  have  presented  so  imposing  an  example  of  man's  capabilities 
for  his  own  advancement,  that  king-craft  aristocracies  and  ail  of  that 
coarse  mode  of  working,  taxing  and  governing  men,  as  family-jobs,  would, 
long  pro  this,  hnve  IKM-II  thrown  into  the  rear  of  the  camp  of  human  pro 
gress,  and  new  forms  of  self-government  would  have  succeeded,  in  which 
the  governed  should  have  been  the  governors,  and  the  interest  of  the  gov 
erned  would  have  prevailed,  in  the  true  advancement  of  the  human  race. 
We,  said  MR.  S.,  have  terrible  penalties  to  pay,  for  abandoning  princi 
ples  so  glorious,  so  wise,  of  which  we  had  a  full  view,  and  by  saying, 
most  shamefully,  the  Declaration  of  Independence  is  a  formula  and  not 
serious,  it  is  the  poetry  of  excited  minds.  By  thus  forsaking  these  great 
truths,  certain  and  as  practical  as  the  Decalogue,  we  fell  back  into'  the 
arms  of  a  low,  base  expediency,  and  relived  the  forms  of  crimes  and  fol 
lies  of  former  ages,  holding  these  sublime  truths  as  abstractions,  fitted 
only  for  the  meridian  of  Heaven,  with  angels  for  their  operatives,  to  carry 
them  out,  while  we  fed  ourselves  upon  the  husks  of  former  absurdities, 
rejecting  truth,  holding  it  too  beautiful  for  practical  use. 

Said  MR.  S.,  will  not  this  Court  set  the  nation  the  shining  example  of 
doing  right,  on  this  question,  by  acting  up  to  the  full  measure  of  their 
judicial  and  moral  power? 

Said  MR.  S.,  a  nation  may  lose  its  liberty  in  a  day,  and  not  miss  it  in  an 
hundred  years ;  this  nation  lost  its  true  liberty,  the  clear  lieht,  the  first  moment 
the  great  words  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  ceased  to  be  honored 
and  respected  as  household,  every-day  truth,  the  fundamental  rules  of 
action,  as  the  political  and  moral  mathematics  of  the  nation. 

Although  we  make  several  hundred  volumes  of  fourth  of  July  orations, 
poetical  self-glorifications  and  boasting  eulogiums  for  the  home-market 
yearly,  in  which  the  most  beautiful  descriptions  are  given  of  the  dress  and 
form  of  liberty,  as  a  wonderful  unknown  goddess,  and  amuse  ourselves  in 
describing  her  altar,  the  costliness  of  her  sacrifices,  and  the  riches  of  her 
perfume,  and  the  curling  smoke  of  her  incense  ;  if  in  the  everyday  inter 
course  of  man  with  man,  of  courts  of  justice  with  causes,  in  expounding 
the  doctrines  of  the  great  declaration  and  of  legislation,  in  framing  new 
rales  of  action,  we  should  with  one  consent,  have  asserted  that  in  the 
Declaration  of  Independence  and  other  national  and  State  Constitu 
tions  containing  the  same  thoughts,  that  liberty  was  sincere,  in  declar 
ing  the  freedom  and  equality  of  all  men,  and  the  inalienability  of  the 
rights,  of  life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness;  for  not  so  doing,  we 
have  lost  liberty,  though  we  do  not  miss  it;  we  have  only  liberty's  casket, 
bur  the  jewel  is  gone ;  we  are  playing  and  satisfying  ourselves  with  forms 
when  the  substance  has  departed.  We  make  the  loud  acclaim,  we  fire 
the  cannon  of  salutation,  crackers  burst  under  our  feet,  our  toasts  mav  be 
drank  in  three  times  three,  in  the  wildest  uproar  of  animal  excitement; 
still  these  demonstrations  are  worse  than  senseless,  because  they  make 
us  think  we  are  true  believers  in  liberty  and  the  divine  dignity  of  man, 
while  we  are  only  high-heeled  hypocrites  and  fanatics,  spinning  in  con 
centric  circles,  like  brain-turned  dervishes  around  an  abstraction  of  liberty, 
1»<  ing  neither  flesh  nor  spirit,  being  the  great  indefinable,  our  adoration 
increasing  with  our  ignorance,  until  the  beatitude  of  our  worship  is  made 
complete  in  the  perfect  idealess.  Still  for  a  pretence  we  make  long 
spc-eolics  about  Republicanism  and  Democracy,  while  we  have  nailed  and 
crucified,  in  and  through  our  colored  brother,  Liberty  on  the  cross.  We 
have  so  long  been  absent  from  true  liberty,  that  we  should  require  a  for- 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  31 

mal  introduction  before  we  should  dare  address  her,  for  she  is  not  that 
tawdry  dressed  cyprian  bearing  her  name,  who  had  sold  her  charms  to 
demagogues,  pimps,  panders,  pirutes,  buccaneers  and  slaveholders,  whip 
in  hand,  who  have  declared  that  slavery  is  the  chief  corner-stone  of  our 
republican  institutions :  while  the  clergy  of  the  south  have  most  impiously 
averred  slavery  to  be  a  Bible,  God-honored,  Christian  institution  to  be  kept. 
Shameful  impiety  and  desecration  of  the  fountain  of  Eternal  truth  ! 

Said  Mr.  S.,  the  Court  will  pardon  me  while  we  look  for  a  moment  at 
the  sublime  teaching  of  that  wonderful  and  holy  book  the  Bible,  so  often 
lugged  in  to  uphold  piracy  at  the  expense  of  the  Eternal's  justice  and 
man's  happiness.  The  Almighty  has  done  a  thousand-fold  more,  to 
express  his  infinite  abhorrence  of  slavery,  than  of  all  other  crimes  and 
olfences  against  his  law.  He  has  suspended  the  laws  of  nature  and  in 
one  instance  of  time,  smote  two  and  a  half  millions  of  people  with  death, 
and  caused  the  sea  itself  to  retreat  before  the  fugitive  slave,  and  made,  as 
predicated  on  these  amazing  exercises  of  power,  a  direct  revelation  of 
himself,  and  immediately  caused  our  revealed  religion  to  be  produced,  to 
express  his  everlasting  detestation  of  a  crime  which  would  unthrone 
Him,  and  crush  his  creature  man,  and  place  him  beside  the  beast  of  the 
field.  Said  Mr.  S.,  our  Maker  destroyed  the  first  edition  of  mankind. 
In  the  second  emission  and  publication  of  ourrace  Egypt  becamethe  school 
master-nation  of  the  human  race,  and  the  great  instructor  of  mankind. 
The  nations  of  the  earth,  on  camels  and  dromedaries,  came,  in  the  infancy 
of  antiquity, to  Egypt,  to  exchange  their  rude  materials  and  ignorance  for 
the  Egyptian  works  of  art  and  knowledge.  In  fact,  no  opinion  was  con 
sidered  worthy  of  general  acceptance,  by  the  surrounding  barbarians,  un 
less  it  hail  an  Egyptian  endorsement,  and  their  wise  men's  stamp  and 
mark  upon  it. 

It  appeared  the  Israelites  in  near  400  years  had  increased  to  two  and  a 
half  millions  of  people,  as  would  seem  from  the  number  of  men  spoken 
of  in  their  Exodus.  The  Pharaohs  had  a  slave  market  for  centuries.  The 
poor  Jews  had  become  slaves  of  the  most  distressing  type.  They  had 
their  overseers,  their  distinct  tasks ;  they  were  scourged,  and  had  every 
mark  of  human  debasement  and  slavery  inflicted.  The  day  of  their  de 
liverance  was  in  an  age,  in  which  the  passion  for  public  structures,  im 
posing  in  their  magnitude,  wonderful  in  their  display  of  high-wrought 
efforts  of  genius,  constituted  the  chief  employment  of  their  kings,  and 
great  men,  for  centuries.  The  poor  Hebrews  had  often  laid  their  petitions 
before  Pharaoh  through  Moses  and  Aaron,  asking  to  be  permitted  to  go 
into  the  wilderness,  and  worship  their  God.  But  Pharaoh,  as  a  slave 
holder,  stood  between  this  people  and  their  conscience,  and  refused  to  let 
them  go.  Slavery  strikes  down  the  rights  of  conscience  always,  for  there 
is  not  a  slave  in  the  United  States,  who  is  informed  in  any  reasonable 
degree  in  the  Christian  religion,  who  does  not  remain  in  slavery,  contrary 
to  the  plainest  teachings  of  his  own  conscience.  The  Almighty  having 
warned  the  Egyptian  government  of  the  great  crime  of  holding  men  in 
bondage,  was  determined,  in  the  early  ages  of  mankind,  to  settle  the  ques 
tion  of  his  infinite  abhorrence  of  slavery,  in  a  manner  so  elementary  and 
signal,  that  the  stamp  of  His  finger-marks  should  remain  unerasable 
through  all  coming  ages.  For  slavery  overthrows  the  will  of  the  victim, 
and  the  claim  of  the  Almighty  to  the  adoration  of  his  creatures ;  and  no 
power  can  get  in  between  God  and  man,  and  interfere  on  this  subject, 
unless  it  is  slavery.  Slavery  breaks  down  the  will,  volition,  and  choice 
of  its  victim ;  the  slaveholder  steps  in  between  the  slave  and  his 
Maker,  and  says,  Oh,  slave,  talk  not  of  conscience,  your  religion,  or  your 
God;  do  my  will,  or  die;  my  will  is  your  law,  and  not  your  God's; 
my  will  you  must  obey,  or  die.  Slavery  always  disputes  our  Maker's 


«**  SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY. 

supremacy;  warning  after  warning,  miracle  after  miracle,  had  been  lost 
upon  the  obduracy  of  Egypt's  king.  One  morning,  as  the  population  of 
that  kingdom  of  15  millions  of  people  arose  and  looked  at  their  beloved 
Nile,  lo  !  and  behold,  it  was  one  vast  river  of  blood,  from  the  cataracts 
where  its  tumbling  torments  of  blood  fell  in  mighty  roar,  and  pursued  its 
sweeping  course  for  600  miles  to  its  seven  mouths,  where  the  Mediterranean, 
receiving  its  tribute  from  this  ancient  servant,  blushed  for  twenty  leagues 
around,  at  Pharaoh's  impudence.  The  stranger  from  afar,  the  traders, 
seekers  of  knowledge,  and  the  citizens,  stood  that  livelong  day,  and 
wondered  at  the  bloody  Nile ;  and  as  reasons  were  asked  and  given,  I 
think  I  hear  them  say,  the  reason  why  the  Nile  runs  blood  is  that 
Pharaoh  holds  the  Hebrews  as  slaves,  and  the  Hebrews'  God  demands 
their  release,  and  shows  his  anger  and  his  power  at  Pharaoh's  refusal. 
The  stranger  would  carry  this  news  to  the  utmost  bounds  of  living  man, 
saying,  one  entire  day  I  saw  the  Nile  run  blood,  to  express  the  abhor 
rence  of  the  Hebrews'  God  against  the  crime  of  slavery.  Again,  the  hea 
vens  were  darkened  at  noon  by  the  gyrations  of  armies  of  locusts,  which 
shut  out  the  sun,  and  they  consumed  the  vegetation  of  this  fertile  land; 
men  cried  for  mercy,  and  in  a  few  hours  this  army  of  destructive  locusts 
was  carried  on  the  wings  of  a  strong  west  wind  into  the  depths  of  the 
Red  Sea,  not  one  left.  The  Egyptian  and  the  stranger  knew  that  the  He 
brews'  God  had  done  this,  to  cause  these  poor  slaves  to  be  delivered  from 
the  mighty  monarch's  cruel  power.  On  a  certain  other  day  the  obstinate 
Pharaoh  refused,  after  many  promises,  to  let  the  poor  Hebrew  slaves  go 
free.  It  is  noon;  the  burning  power  of  a  June  sun  strikes  the  land  ;  anon, 
all  eyes  in  Egypt  are  turned  to  a  black  cloud  rising  out  of  the  west,  over 
the  Lybian  desert. 

Said  MR.  S.,  this  was  the  first  thunder-storm  in  Egypt,  and  the  last,  for 
it  neither  rains  nor  hails  in  Egypt,  owing  to  the  great  Lybian  desert  of 
sand  on  the  west,  and  the  Arabian  desert  on  the  east,  as  philosophers 
suppose.  It  skirts  the  western  heavens,  and  the  terrific  clouds  raise 
themselves  higher  and  higher ;  men  turn  pale ;  anon  the  low  and 
solemn  tones  of  thunder  are  heard  ;  men  tremble,  and  say  it  is  the  voice 
of  the  slaves'  God, — in  a  moment  the  flashes  of  forked  lightning  play  with 
infinite  quickness,  men  fall  on  their  knees  and  declare  it  is  the  flashing 
of  the  angry  eyes  of  the  Hebrews'  God  at  the  Egyptians'  cruelties.  The 
clouds  rise  to  the  high  altitude  of  noon ;  the  lightning,  the  winds,  and 
roaring  thunder  send  consternation  into  the  hearts  of  affrighted  men.  It 
appears  like  night,  nature  in  agony,  men  fear  to  speak,  and  believe  they 
are  on  the  eve  of  doom;  men  and  beasts  hide  themselves  in  extreme  ter 
ror  ;  the  thunder  makes  the  earth  tremble  from  pole  to  pole;  the  pyramids 
rock  from  their  deep  foundations,  the  rains  descend,  the  hail  beats  the 
earth,  fire  arid  ice  leap  from  the  clouds,  while  the  lightning  strikes  down 
the  trees,  plays  round  the  pyramid  tops,  smites  the  sphinx,  and  runs 
along  upon  the  ground,  men  in  agony  praying  for  deliverance  ;  Pha 
raoh  and  his  court  lie  prostrate  in  the  palace,  the  earth  seems  shaken  out 
of  its  place,  and  all  nature  in  convulsions.  The  king  implores  mercy, 
and  the  Father  of  all  hears,  pities  and  delivers,  the  faithless  king  and  peo 
ple,  and  ere  the  sun  went  down, that  storm  and  desolation  had  forever  gone 
by,  and  the  last  cloud  sunk  below  the  horizon,  in  the  Red  Sea,  while  the 
beautiful  sun  rolls  down  the  western  heavens,  smiling  in  mercy  from  and 
beyond  the  dark  solitudes  of  the  interminable  Lybian  sands.  This 
storm,  all  men  knew,  was  an  evidence  of  God's  displeasure  at  slavery. 
But  Pharaoh  would  not  let  the  people  go. 

It.  is  in  Egypt,  and  is  midnight,  when  the  young  wife,  but  two  years 
married,  awoke  and  placed  her  hand  on  the  shoulder  of  her  youthful  hus 
band  ;  he  was  as  cold  as  marble,  he  would  not  awake  at  her  mournful 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  33~ 

cry — he  was  dead,  he  was  the  first  born  of  his  parents.  She  arose  in  wild 
despair,  she  lit  a  flambeau,  and  looked  at  her  little  babe  on  the  mattress; 
the  fixed  smile  was  there,  rigid  in  death,  never  to  be  relaxed  ;  he  was  the 
first  born  of  his  parents ;  she  flies  to  her  father's  and  mother's  bed  in 
the  next  room,  she  awakes  her  father,  but  none  but  the  archangel  can 
arouse  her  mother  from  death's  sleep,  most  profound ;  she  was  the  first 
born  of  her  parents.  She  sends  her  man-servant  to  her  neighbor  for  help 
in  this  awful  hour ;  the  servant  enters  the  neighbor's,  a  light  is  there, 
wailing  and  horror  meet  him.  The  aged  father  of  the  second  house  was 
the  first  born  of  his  parents,  and  is  dead,  and  the  infant  first  born  is  also. 
No  contortion,  no  groan  was  ever  heard  of  all  who  fell  in  a  single  instant* 
on  that  dr  eadful  night ;  they  lay  with  all  the  peace  of  eternal  sleep  upon 
them.  The  servant  finds  another  servant  in  this  second  house  of  death, 
they  go  out,  they  hear  the  survivors'  wail,  and  see  the  baleful  torch  lit  up 
in  every  house  around  ;  they  ascend  a  tower  on  the  banks  of  the  Nile, 
high  above  and  all  around  as  in  a  moment  for  forty  miles,  as  far  as  eye 
can  measure  light  upon  the  earth's  dark  face,  the  beams  of  the  death 
torch  of  that  direful  hour  from  all  directions  strike  their  wretched  eyes. 
The  lamentations  were  loud  and  long  ;  and  when  the  morning  sun  arose, 
the  angel  of  death  for  long  hours  had  been  gone  from  the  abodes  of  man  and 
beast,  and  there  was  not  one  house  in  all  the  land  of  Egypt  in  which  there 
was  not  one  dead,  or  about  two  and  half  millions,  or  one  sixth  of  the 
people,  or  a  life  of  one  of  Egypt's  slaveholders  had  been  taken,  for  each 
Hebrew  slave  detained.  No" mistaking  the  power  and  will  of  the  God  of 
the  bondmen  longer,  and  the  affrighted  Pharaoh  and  his  court  cry  to  these 
slaves,  "  up  and  be  gone,  or  we  are  all  dead  men."  The  funeral,  the  most 
terrible  in  time,  then  followed.  Nothing  like  these  deaths  or  funerals,  in 
the  history  of  our  race.  The  fugitive  slaves  had  marched  to  the  north 
east  and  reached  the  Red  Sea,  and  were  in  great  fear,  reposing  on  its 
banks  between  two  mountains,  the  one  on  their  right,  and  the  other  on 
their  left.  Solemn  hours !  As  they  rested  we  may  feign  that  young 
Hebrews  climb  to  the  mountain  tops,  and  saw  the  rising  clouds  of  dust 
on  the  south-western  edge  of  the  heavens.  That  army  is  led  on  by 
Pharaoh's  generals,  of  chariots  and  cavalry,  the  notes  of  trumpets 
fell  upon  their  ears,  and  the  young  men  cry  to  their  friends  below,  "  They 
come  !  they  come  !  we  hear  their  trumpets  on  the  plain  !" 

Then  the  desponding  fugitives  cried,  "  Were  there  no  graves  in  Egypt?" 
The  night  came,  portentous ;  a  mighty  cloud  rested  between  the  slave 
holders  and  the  trembling  fugitives.  On  the  side  next  to  the  poor  slaves, 
the  cloud  beamed  as  from  a  pillar  of  fire,  all  light,  the  smile  of  heaven. 
On  the  other  side  of  the  cloud  the  pursuing  slaveholders  saw  it  all  dark, 
lugubrious,  presaging  to  them  the  horrors  of  their  last  day.  This  was 
another  finger-mark  of  Divine  power.  The  morning  lowered,  and  in 
clouds,  to  these  sad  and  impious  slaveholders  heavily  brought  on  that  day 
whose  end  they  would  never  see.  The  trembling  fugitives  stood  looking 
nine  miles  across  the  intervening  Red  Sea,  whose  waves  broke 
in  melancholy  murmurs  at  their  feet.  Despair  was  on  every  face. 
When  Moses  spoke, "  stand  still  and  see  the  salvation  of  the  Lord," 
another  finger-mark  of  Omnipotence  was  made,  and  Moses  stretched  out 
his  rod  over  the  Red  Sea,  and  anon  a  long  line  of  subsidence  of  the  waters 
appears.  Every  fugitive  eye  saw  it.  Then  the  re-flowing  of  waters  from 
that  central  line,  the  piling  of  waters  follow;  the  waters  ascend  and  pile, 
ascend  and  pile,  until  the  naked  bottom  across  appears  with  perpen 
dicular  water  walls  of  great  height,  by  Omnipotence  held  up,  and  proba 
bly  one  mile  wide  is  left  like  a  clean  beach.  The  fugitives  pass  down  on 
this  untraveled  road,  and  finally  division  after  division  rose  upon  the 
further  side.  At  length  the  weak  passed  up,  the  cripple  climb  the  bank. 


34  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

and  lo!  there  see  those  little  orphans  pull  themselves  up  by  twigs,  and 
that  poor  old  man  on  his  crutches,  they  help  pull  him  up— they  are  all 
up  and  over.  Now  rises  the  wildest,  grandest,  and  most  sublime  music 
which  ever  burst  from  human  lips — the  fugitives'  soug!  The  headlong 
vindictive  slaveholders,  burning  with  rage,  thirsting  for  revenge,  follow 
on  the  fugitives'  track  into  the  sea ;  and  as  they  were  at  the  central  depths 
of  the  Red  Sea,  gravitation  was  permitted  to  re-assert  her  ancient  law, 
when  down  came  these  mighty  mountains  of  waters  to  their  ancient  bed. 
Pharaoh  and  his  haughty  hosts  expired  in  the  centre  of  a  miracle.  For 
forty  years  the  Almighty  fed  these  poor  fugitive  slaves  directly  from  His 
own  table. 

Said  MR.  S.,  the  God  of  Heaven,  as  in  mercy  to  man,  that  he  might 
never  again  commit  the  atrocious  crime  involved  in  slavery,  caused 
Mount  Sinai  to  quake  from  its  deep  foundations,  and  amidst  the  thunders 
and  the  lightnings  the  Almighty,  with  his  own  finger,  wrote  the  tables 
of  the  law,  his  ten  eternal  orders,  which  is  most  eminently  anti-slavery 
in  character,  that  the  crime  which  had  shook  Egypt  to  its  foundations 
might  never  occur  again  for  want  of  a  Divine  prohibition.  This  was  the 
decalogue, "  Love  the  Lord  thy  God  with  all  thy  heart,  mind,  and  strength, 
and  thy  neighbor  as  thyself."  This  command  obeyed,  destroys  all  the 
slavery  in  the  world.  What  slaveholder  can  kindly  love  his  slave 
unless  he  manumits  him  ? 

The  preface  to  these  commands,  in  the  sixth  verse  of  the  fifth  chapter  of 
Deuteronomy,  "  I  am  the  Lord  thy  God,  which  brought  thee  out  of  the  land 
of  Egypt,  and  from  the  house  of  bondage:' 

"  Honor  thy  father  and  mother."  No,  says  the  slaveholder,  I  will  sell 
your  father  and  mother,  you  must  obey  your  master. 

"  Thou  shalt  not  ki-ll."  I  will  kill,  says  the  slaveholder,  if  it  is  necessary, 


the  marriage  covenant  between  my  slaves,  and  compel  them  to  marry 
over  when  my  interest  will  be  promoted,  or  separate  man  and  wife  by 
sale,  or  purchase  arid  make  them  marry  again. 

"  Thou  shalt  not  steal."  I  will  steal,  and  appropriate,  says  the  slave 
holder,  all  the  man  hath,  all  he  can  earn,  and  the  man  himself,  when  my 
interest  can  be  promoted  thereby. 

"  Thou  shalt  not  covet."  I  will  covet  that  man's  or  that  woman's  body, 
and  I  will  possess  myself  of  them,  and  appropriate  them  to  my  own  use, 
says  the  slaveholder." 

Said  MR.  S.,  look  at  the  condescension  of  the  Almighty.  He  made  these 
poor  fugitive  slaves,  the  Librarians  and  Custodians  of  the  revelation  of 
his  will  to  mankind.  Slavery  treads  this  revelation  under  foot,  and  quotes 
the  Bible  to  prove  slavery,  when  there  is  the  most  incontestable  evidence 
that  there  never  would  have  been  a  revelation  in  the  decalogue,  but  a 
the  finishing  stroke  of  those  awful  wonders  and  miracles,  on  the  faith 
of  which  our  religion  rests,  all  originating,  converging  and  terminating 
in  that  great  fundamental  proposition,  that  God  infinitely  abhors  slavery, 
because  it  supplants  his  direct  authority  over  the  will  of  His  child,  and 
throws  His  child,  with  an  immortal  mind,  made  in  his  own  image,  into 
the  category  of  brute-beasts,  thus  for  ever  overthrowing  the  fundamental 
relation  of  God  to  man,  of  man  to  his  neighbor,  and  of  man  to  himself. 
To  vindicate  the  character,  power,  and  justice  of  the  Supreme,  and  bring 
man  home  again  to  his  true  relations,  was  well  worthy  of  a  display  of 
such  awful  power,  introducing  Himself  as  God  to  the  ancient  world. 

MR.  S.  said  there  was  another  proposition  which  he  wished  to  glance 
at  in  passing.   That  was  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  for  he  con- 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  OD 

tended,  were  he  before  the  King's  Bench,  in  Westminster  Hall,  he  would 
there  insist,  and  he  believed  with  entire  success,  that  there  was  not  a 
slave  in  New  Jersey,  or  in  any  slave  State,  who  had  been  deprived  of  his 
liberty  according  to  law.  I  mean  slaves  as  they  are  generally  and  at  large, 
and  not  those  who  have  been  convicted  of  crimes  ;  and  therefore  there  is 
not  a  slave,  if  you  admit  him  a  person,  as  slaveholders  contend,  but  must 
be  discharged  by  a  judge  or  a  court,  on  being  brought  before  said  court 
on  the  ground  that  lie  has  never  been  deprived  of  his  liberty  by  due  pro 
cess  of  law,  according  to  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States.  That 
record  must  be  produced,  originating  in  a  decision  or  an  indictment  of  a 
grand  jury,  and  the  finding  of  a  petit  jury,  and  the  pronouncing  of  judg 
ment  thereon,  by  a  court  of  competent  jurisdiction.  This,  Sir  Edward 
Coke,  and  Judge  Story  on  Sir  Edward's  authority,  in  his  Commentaries, 
440,  says  is  the  meaning  of  due  process  of  law  at  common  law,  as  used 
in  Magna  Charta.  But  1,  said  MR.  S.,  am  willing  to  reduce  the  character 
of  the  court,  and  even  strike  out  the  petit  and  grand  jury  from  the  instru 
mentality — and  then  I  say  that  "due  process  of  law"  means  a  court  or 
some  judicial  personage,  one  or  more  making  a  court,  who  have  adjudi 
cated  the  man  to  be  a  slave;  and  if  that  record  cannot  be  found,  the  man 
must  go  free,  or  the  individual  must  not  lose  his  liberty  without  due 
process  of  law.  That  record  cannot  be  found  in  this  land.  Will  any 
man  pretend  that  plantation  and  cart-whip  discipline  is  due  process  of 
law  ?  Will  any  pretend  that  being  deprived  of  the  right  to  learn  to  read, 
or  write,  as  in  some  of  our  States,  under  the  penalty  of  twenty-five  lashes 
on  the  naked  back  of  the  teacher  and  the  taught,  is  due  process  of  law? 
Yes,  for  the  mother  to  teach  her  child  to  spell  the  name  of  the  Saviour, 
for  the  second  attempt,  mother  and  child  are  to  be  whipped  one  hundred 
lashes;  for  the  third  offence,  the  punishment  is  death.  Is  this  the  due 
process  of  law,  named  in  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States?  The 
pursuing  of  fugitives  with  blood-hounds,  cannot  be  the  due  process  of 
law  of  the  Constitution  ? 

The  separation  by  sale  of  husband  from  wife,  and  wife  from  husband, 
and  children  from  both,  to  suit  the  convenience  of  the  master,  cannot  be 
due  process  of  law  ?  The  being  born  of  slave  mother,  on  a  slaveholder's 

Elautation,  cannot  be  due  process  of  law  ?    The  being  torn  away  from 
ome,  kindred  and  friends,  and  sent  by  the  middle  passage  to  a  slave 
auction  in  South  Carolina,  and  sold  on  the  boards  into  hopeless  bondage, 
cannot  be  due  process  of  law? 

Is  not  slavery  a  punishment  or  an  infliction  on  men  beyond  the  track  of 
the  common  misfortunes  of  mankind,  of  sufficient  magnitude  to  have  it 
left  to  the  adjudication  of  some  mortal  man,  in  the  shape  of  a  justice  or 
judge,  adjudicating  a  man  into  the  great  drag-net  of  slavery  ?  For,  we 
find  it  takes  the  strongest  judicial  power  in  the  land  to  get  him  out 
Slaveholders  claim  him  under  the  word  "person"  in  the  Constitution,  be 
cause  they  say,  there  is  no  other  word  by  which  they  can  denote  slavery. 
The  word  person,  I  have,  in  this  argument  in  relation  to  due  process  of 
law  used  in  the  slaveholding  sense,  which  is,  after  all,  downright  per 
version. 

The  word  person,  in  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  means  a 
human  being  possessed  of  natural  rights  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness.  The  word  person  means  a  human  being  in  the  fullness  of 
his  natural  rights,  and  nothing  more.  The  Greeks,  Romans,  and  English, 
whether  using  the  word  in  law  or  in  common  parlance,  mean  this,  and 
nothing  more  ;  and  you  can  legally  no  more  express  the  idea  of  a  slave 
by  it  than  you  can  that  of  a  King.  A  man  who  is  a  slave  according  to 
slave  law,  has  lost  his  personage,  if  I  may  so  speak,  and  has  passed  into 
chattelhood,  or  thinghood,  and  all  the  rights  of  person  are  annihilated,  or 


00  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

in  a  state  of  suspended  animation,  until  the  pure  air  of  Liberty  inflates  his 
lungs  again.  The  Constitution  of  the  United  States  is  an  Anti-slavery  docu 
ment,  iri  its  general  spirit  and  tendencies;  and  under  other  auspices  and  cir 
cumstances  would  have  been  called  a  great  act  of  universal  emancipation, 
and  have  set  every  slave  free  in  the  land,  being  paramount  law,  without 
doing  the  thousandth  part  of  violence  in  construction  which  has  been  done 
by  a  slaveholding  interpretation,  by  which  it  has  been  made  into  a  slave- 
holding  document,  to  create  the  horrid  institution  by  re-enacting  the  slave 
laws  of  the  two  States  of  Virginia  and  Maryland,  thereby  covering  the  two 
sections  of  the  District  of  Columbia,  in  creating  and  regulating  by  territo 
rial  laws,  slavery  in  eight  of  the  new  States,  five  of  which,  Florida,  Louisi 
ana,  Mississippi,  Arkansas  and  Missouri,  were  not  a  portion  of  the  United 
States  or  its  territories  at  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States.  The  Congress  of  the  United  States  under  slaveholding  dictation 
created  slavery,  therefore,  in  Kentucky,  Tennessee  and  Alabama,  a  portion 
of  our  territory  at  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution ;  and  in  the  other  five 
States  the  nation  purchased  the  territory  and  created  the  institution  in 
them,  as  territories,  and  the  Congress  then  brought  these  five  slave  States 
into  the  sisterhood  of  the  republic.  And  now  we  are  told  slavery  is  a 
State-institution  and  is  beyond  the  reach  of  any  power  of  Congress,  for 
its  extermination  ;  that  is,  that  Congress  has  power  to  create  and  fasten 
this  infernal  institution  on  a  territory,  but  has  no  power  to  abolish  it  any 
where,  after  it  has  enacted  it  once  into  existence,  either  in  its  territorial 
or  State  character;  it  has  no  power  to  lop,  restrain  or  eradicate  slavery 
from  a  State  or  territory,  but  is  bound  to  foster  and  nurture  it  writh 
parental  care,  as  one  of  the  patriarchal,  domestic  and  peculiar  institutions  of 
the  south.  Permit  me  to  assert,  as  it  regards  these  States,  that  Congress 
had  no  more  power  to  create  slavery  there  in  the  beginning,  than  it  had 
to  create  an  autocrat  in  either  of  those  States  or  territories,  in  wrhose 
hand  and  his  heirs,  all  power,  legislative,  judicial  and  executive,  should 
be  centred  for  ever  with  full  power  to  sell  or  dispose  of  the  bodies 
of  all  the  people  or  inhabitants  who  should  or  might  come  within  the 
bounds  of  his  territory  or  State.  For  the  power  exercised  in  the  case  of 
slavery  by  one  half  of  the  inhabitants,  over  the  other,  is  precisely  the 
same  in  degree  and  kind  as  that  described,  only  the  number  of  the 
autocrats  is  increased.  Each  autocrat  has  a  less  number  of  subjects,  but 
the  power  exercised  is  precisely  the  same  in  extent,  and  in  relation  to 
those  on  whom  it  operates,  is  the  same  precise  autocratism,  as  though 
there  was  but  one  despot.  Now  I  deny  that  Congress  has  lawful  power 
to  do  any  such  thing. 

Many  persons  run  to  the  Madison  papers  published  in  the  last  few 
years,  to  ascertain  the  meaning  of  the  framers  of  the  Constitution,  who 
met  in  Philadelphia  in  1787,  as  a  mere  committee  of  the  nation,  sent  out 
to  report  to  the  people  the  form  of  a  Constitution  for  their  adoption  in 
the  summer  of  1788.  I  deny  in  any  event,  the  right  to  resort  to  this  mode 
of  interpretation,  to  contradict  the  noble  and  glorious  text  of  that  docu 
ment;  but  supposing  this  a  correct  mode  of  getting  darkness  into  the  room 
to  show  the  light,  still  it  is  not  applied  at  the  right  point.  Thirteen 
State  conventions  were  held  in  the  year  1788,  by  the  authority  of  their 
respective  legislatures,  to  adopt  or  reject  what  had  been  framed,  by  a 
committee-convention  of  the  nation,  as  a  body  of  draughters  of  the  form 
of  the  Constitution,  who  had  been  sent  to  Philadelphia,  during  the  sum 
mer  of  1787,  to  do  that  very  work ;  not  to  adopt  that  Constitution,  but  to 
report  the  form  of  one,  to  the  people  of  the  States. 

In  the  summer  of  1788,  the  people,  in  their  thirteen  State  Conventions, 
by  the  constitutional  number  of  nine,  adopted  this  Constitution ;  and  if 
this  rule  of  interpretation  now  sought  to  be  adopted,  could  be  made  ap- 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  37 

phcable  anywhere,  we  should  have  to  go  to  the  adopters,  and  not  the 
framers.  What,  and  how  did  the  adopters,  the  people,  understand  this  in 
strument  when  they  adopted  it  ?  Did  they  understand  it  in  any  sense  dif 
ferent  from  what  it  imports  on  its  face  ?  Where  are  the  secret  intentions, 
private  understandings,  those  implied  guarantees  and  curious  fanciful 
compromises  of  those  thirteen  Conventions  of  adopters  ?  Have  they  ever 
come  to  light  except  in  some  long  speech  of  some  Southern  slaveholding 
orator?  How  come  the  descendants  of  those  slaveholders  of  1788  to  be 
made  the  special  depositees  of  all  those  secret  guarantees,  compromises, 
and  implied  understandings,  in  behalf  of  slavery,  now  spoken  of  with  a 
confidence  as  startling  as  the  information  communicated  is  important, 
novel,  and  false.  This  was  not  so.  These  are  mere  after- thoughts  of 
despotism.  No  man  has  ever  shown  one  word  from  the  adopters,  con 
flicting  with  the  text.  Shall  a  committee  sent  out  by  the  nation,  affix  to 
well  understood  language  of  the  common  law,  and  of  every  day  use,  some 
secret  cabalistic  meaning  in  hostility  to  the  text;  and  then  get  the  people, 
through  their  Conventions,  to  adopt  the  Constitution  for  the  beautiful 
principles  it  expressed  on  its  face,  and  after  that  was  accomplished,  to 
wait  till  the  framers  and  adopters  are  dead,  and  then  to  come  out  and  say, 
ah,  the  people  have  adopted  this  Constitution,  for  what  it  purported  on  its 
face,  but  we,  the  sons  and  grandsons  of  the  Southern  framers,  have  a  caba 
listic  key  left  by  our  grandfathers  in  the  South,  by  which,  when  the  word 
justice  appears,  our  grandfathers  meant  slavery  or  injustice ;  when  we  used 
the  word  persons  we  meant  slaves  sometimes,  and  sometimes  free  persons  ; 
when  we  said  "  no  person  shall  be  deprived  of  life,  liberty,  or  property 
without  due  process  of  law,"  we  there  understood  a  slave  to  be  a  chattel  or  a 
piece  of  property,  and  not  a  person ;  we  had  a  sliding-scale  by  which 
we  used  the  word  person  for  slave  when  the  interest  of  the  slaveholder  is 
to  be  promoted,  but  when  the  language  can  be  applied  to  him  as  a  person 
in  another  part  of  the  instrument,  and  thereby  set  him  free,  the  intend- 
ment  is  to  be  against  liberty,  and  that  we  did  not  mean  that  he  should 
have  any  of  the  blessings  of  the  Constitution,  but-  only  its  curses  and  its 
cruelty.  When  the  word  person  means  bitter,  it  is  the  slave's  portion ;  when 
the  word  person  means  sweet,  he  has  no  lot  or  part  in  that  matter.  Although 
the  word  person  never  meant  slave  in  any  written  document  before  we 
affixed,  it  among  ourselves,  or  our  grandfathers  did,  in  this  peculiar  sense, 
and  refused  to  use  the  word  slave.  This  was  the  secret  opinion  of  the 
drafters,  who  supposed  they  could  thus  deceive  the  adopters  into  adop 
tion.  When  we  enacted  that  Article  by  which  we  said  "  The  United 
States  shall  guarantee  a  republican  form  of  government  to  each  of  the 
States,"  we  knew  the  old  and  true  meaning  of  a  republican  govern 
ment  to  be  one  in  which  the  government  was  made  by  and  for  the  benefit 
of  the  governed,  and  that  each  person  in  a  republican  form  of  govern 
ment  was  born  free  and  equal,  and  entitled  to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pur 
suit  of  happiness.  This,  we  knew,  would,  by  force  of  this  provision 
in  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  if  faithfully  honored,  blot 
out  slavery  from  every  State  Constitution,  and  every  State  upholding  a 
proposition  of  slavery  by  State  legislation,  it  being  diametrically  opposite 
to  a  republican  form  of  government ;  therefore,  it  was  agreed  secretly,  as 
a  compromise,  by  the  framers  of  the  Constitution,  as  one  of  the  secret 
compromises  or  implied  guarantees,  against  liberty,  that  this  should  be 
an  unexercised  article,  or  an  unused  function  of  the  Federal  Constitution,  as 
a  sort  of  fifth  wheel  to  a  coach ;  because,  if  carried  out,  it  would  cut  up 
slavery,  root  and  branch,  in  the  old  States  then  made,  and  in  the  new  to 
be  made.  Therefore,  says  this  secret  compromise-keeper,  we,  at  the  ses 
sion  of  Congress  in  1845,  in  pursuance  of  our  secret  compromise  of  inter 
pretation  of  language,  with  its  use  and  disuse,  and  under  the  suspension 


38 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 


of  that  article  of  the  Federal  Constitution  guaranteeing  a  republican  form 
of  government,  we  admitted  Florida  as  a  State,  as  we  had  several  slave 
States  before,  in  which  we  permitted  this  Article  of  the  Constitution,  guar 
anteeing  a  republican  form  of  government  to  each  State,  to  be  overridden 
and  totally  disregarded,  as  though  it  did  not  exist ;  and  in  the  Florida  Con 
stitution  Slavery  is  held  such  a  sacred  and  central  right  among  her  Insti 
tutions,  that  it  is  placed  out  of  reach  and  beyond  the  control  of  her  own 
legislature,  and  that  colored  freemen  coming  into  that  State  from  Maine, 
Massachusetts,  or  other  free  States,  may  be  sold  as  slaves  :  and  the  right 
the  Constitution  guarantees  to  each  citizen  of  one  State  in  enjoying  all 
the  privileges  of  citizenship  in  another  State,  says  our  secret  compromise- 
keeper,  means,  as  it  was  understood  by  the  framers  in  the  cabalistic  cata 
logue,  that  this  part  of  the  Constitution  should  never  apply  to  a  Massa 
chusetts  or  Rhode  Island  citizen,  if  his  great  grandmother  had  a  drop  of 
African  blood  in  her  veins ;  and  that  although  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  had  abolished  attainders  in  this  country,  still,  so  far  as  free 
colored  citizens  were  concerned  in  coming  from  free'to  slave  States,  they 
were  to  be  regarded,  in  defiance  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States, 
as  attainted, — yes,  the  victims  of  a  colored  attainder,  and  subject  to  the 
awful  judgment  of  perpetual  slavery  for  showing  their  colored  heads  with 
no  helmet  but  the  Federal  Constitution  for  their  protection  in  a  slave  State. 
And  if  the  old  State  of  New  Jersey  had  had  the  benefit  of  the  Federal 
Constitution  before  the  adoption  of  your  new  Constitution  of  18-14.  and  if 
Congress  had  given  this  State  the  practical  benefit  of  a  Republican  form 
of  Government,  by  abolishing  in  Congress  your  State  slave  laws,  as  con 
trary  to  a  Republican  form  of  Government,  it  would  not  have  been  neces 
sary  for  me  to  have  troubled  your  Honors,  the  legislation  of  Congress 
being  paramount  to  all  State  Constitutions  and  State  legislation  on  all 
points  within  its  Constitutional  jurisdiction.  And  although  the  Constitu 
tion  of  a  State  may  be  silent  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  still,  if  slaveholding 
legislation  dishonor  the  State  statute  book,  then  Congress  has  jurisdiction 
to  abolish  such  State  law,  as  renders  the  form  of  that  State  Government 
hostile  to  a  Republican  form  of  Government.  The  form  of  a  State  Gov 
ernment  may  be  Republican  in  its  Constitution,  but  legislation!  may 
spring  up  in  that  State,  by  which  one  half  of  the  people  may  assume  to 
own  the  other  half,  indirect  hostility  to  a  Republican  form  of  Government, 
and  the  United  States,  said  MR.  S.,  is  then  bound,  by  some  exercise  of 
sovereign  power,  to  restore  to  the  people  of  New  Jersey,  a  Republican 
form  of  Government,  either  by  legislation  in  Congress  or  by  the  exercise 
of  judicial  power  through  the  Federal  or  State  judiciaries  ;  and  if  through 
the  latter,  then  I  am  in  my  proper  place  to  contend  here  this  day  that 
this  old  law  of  slavery  was  unconstitutional  ever  since  the  adoption  of 
the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  as  being  contrary  to  the  fundamen 
tal  guarantee  of  the  Republic,  and  all  State  laws  conflicting  with  said 
guarantee  of  a  Republican  form  of  Government  are  null  and  void,  as 
much  as  a  State  law  violating  the  liberty  of  conscience  secured  by  the 
Constitution  ;  and  if  this  ground  be  a  sound  position,  the  slave  laws  have 
been  void  from  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution,  as  being  in  direct  hos 
tility  to  the  solemn  guarantee  in  the  Constitution  in  favor  of  a  Republican 
form  of  Government.  Give  me,  said  MR.  S.,  a  Republican  form  of  Govern 
ment  in  the  Constitution  and  the  legislation  of  a  State,  and  I  defy  any 
man  to  hold  a  human  being  in  that  State  as  a  slave,  according  to  the  law 
of  that  country,  until  the  meaning  of  language  is  revolutionized. 

Said  MR.  S.,the  very  idea  of  a  Constitution  of  the  United  States  in  an 
enlarged  view,  if  he  were  able  to  take  one,  would  be  replete  with  conse 
quences  full  of  glorious  import  to  the  bondmen  of  this  land.  As  has  been 
said  by  me  before  in  the  course  of  this  argument,  a  Constitution  springs 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  39 

from  our  weakness  and  need  of  protection,  and  is  a  covenant  of  the  whole 
people  with  each  person,  and  of  each  person  with  the  whole  people,  for 
the  protection  and  defence  of  our  natural  rights,  of  life,  liberty,  and  the 
pursuit  of  happiness.  Is  it  possible  to  conceive  that  a  people  meeting 
from  their  mutual  weakness,  and  after  coming  together,  conclude  to  make 
a  charter  party  of  piracy  ?  That,  although  they  agree  to  protect  and 
defend  five-sixths  of  the  people  in  their  natural  rights,  yet,  as  it  regards 
the  other  sixth,  they  solemnly  covenant  and  guarantee,  to  give  them  no 
protection  or  advantage  therefrom,  but  covenant  to  strip  said  one-sixth  of 
their  natural  rights  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness ;  and 
reduce  them  to  chattels,  men-breathing-property,  so  that  they  would  be 
infinite  losers  by  forming  a  Constitution.  Instead  of  having  their  natural 
rights  protected,  they  are  stript  of  the  right  to  themselves,  and  delivered 
over  to  masters,  who,  drunk  or  sober,  reasonable  or  unreasonable,  sensi 
ble  or  foolish,  are  to  make  for  them  Constitutions  and  laws, in  the  height 
of  passion,  prompted  by  lust,  avarice  or  meanness,  from  hour  to  hour, 
and  day  to  day,  until  life's  end.  The  slaveholders  contend  the  Constitu 
tion  of 'the  United  States  secured  them  these  terrible  advantages.  If  it 
did,  and  the  adopters  had  so  understood  it,  I  do  riot  believe  a  single  State 
would  have  seriously  entertained  an  idea  for  its  adoption  for  a  single 
moment,  north  of  the  State  of  Delaware. 

To  be  sure,  said  MR.  S.,  we  have  lived  under  an  invisible  Constitution 
of  slaveholding  construction  for  fifty-five  years,  which  we  have  never 
seen,  but  have  often  bitterly  felt — the  good  honest  .anti-slavery  Constitu 
tion  which  should  have  gone  into  operation  on  the  fourth  of  March*.  1789, 
as  it  was  honestly  adopted,  and  if  carried  out,  in  the  integrity  of  its  high 
and  glorious  purpose,  would,  long  ere  this,  have  extirpaied  slavery  from, 
this  guilty  land,  and  made  it  the  paradise  of  the  New  World.  But  the 
government,  from  its  adoption,  has  been  under,  as  a  general  proposition, 
the  control  of  slaveholding  Presidents,  Vice  Presidents,  Speakers  of  the 
House  of  Representatives,  who  organized  the  legislative  power  with  five 
millions  of  whites  at  the  south,  and  ten  millions  of  whites  in  the  north. 
The  south  should  have  had  three  of  the  nine  judges  of  the  Supreme  Court  of 
the  United  States,  but  they  have  five  and  the  north  four ;  they  have  two- 
thirds  of  the  foreign  ministers,  the  principal  officers  on  the  sea  and  on  the 
land.  The  south  have  furnished  the  spiracles  through  which  the  government 
has  breathed,  yes,  and  the  eyes  with  which  it  saw,  the  ears  with  which 
it  heard,  and  the  tongues  and  pens  by  which  it  spoke  and  wrote.  It  is  no 
wonder  the  ship  lost  the  track  of  its  contemplated  voyage,  and  became 
the  abused  organ  of  a  section  of  the  land  whose  supposed  interests  prose 
cuted  an  implacable  war  upon  human  rights,  or  in  other  words  the 
basis  and  prosperity  of  whose  peculiar  institutions  were  quickened  into 
life  by  tears  and  blood,  and  found  their  proper  aliment  in  crushing  and 
prostituting  the  rights  of  one  half  of  their  own  population,  and  hold 
ing  human  labor  in  contempt,  by  which  three  millions  of  their  own  pop 
ulation  being  white  men,  could  not  labor  by  the  side  of  the  slave  with 
out  disgrace  ;  and  they,  the  whites,  having  no  capital  but  their  labor,  sunk 
down  to  a  point  of  degradation  but  little  above  the  slaves,  no  schools, 
they  became  the  lazaroni  of  this  continent,  while  some  forty  thousand 
oligarchies,  owning  most  of  the  land  and  the  slaves,  and  being  prompted 
by  ambition  arid  money,  moved  by  the  common  spirit  of  slavery,  the 
true  bond  of  connection  and  source  of  their  political  power;  these  men 
have  snatched  this  Constitution  from  the  nation,  and  have  given  us  by 
the  force  of  suppression,  violation,  construction  and  interpretation,  com 
mingled  with  their  fanciful  guarantees  and  compromises,  a  Constitution 
as  by  them  administered,  bearing  a  faint  resemblance  to  the  one  given 
us  by  the  fathers  of  the  Revolution,  with  their  wounds  yet  uiihealed  from 


40  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

the  battle-fields  of  freedom.  The  preamble  of  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  must  have  been  adopted  after  the  whole  document  had 
been  prepared  by  the  framers,  as  the  grand  exponent  of  intention;  and  as 
so  much  is  said  by  slaveholding  casuistry,  that  I  have  often  thought  the 
framers  of  that  instrument  had  a  melancholy  foreboding,  that  attempts 
might  be  made  by  the  crafty  and  designing  of  an  after  age,  to  pervert 
that  document  so  plain  and  so  full  of  good  sense  and  virtuous  principle 
to  some  sinister  purpose;  therefore,  as  an  everlasting  finger-board  point 
ing  to  the  straight  road  of  intent,  they  virtually  said, — "  Here  we  unlock 
our  hearts,  as  to  object  and  design,  and  we  say,  trust  not  those  who  tell  you 
this  is  not  the  truth.  This  is  our  design :  We,  the  people  of  the  United 
States,  in  order  to  form  a  more  perfect  union,  establish  justice,  secure 
domestic  tranquillity,  provide  for  the  common  defence  and  promote  the 
general  welfare,  and  secure  the  blessings  of  Liberty,  for  us  and  our  pos 
terity,  do  establish  and  ordain  this  Constitution  for  the  United  States  of 
America." 

What  purity  and  nobility  of  object !  How  much  have  we  had  practi 
cally  of  this  Constitution,  by  slaveholding  construction  ?  said  MR.  S.  Let 
us  see  how  it  would  read  if  made  for  the  object  contended  by  slavehold 
ers  and  their  apologists,  and  as  we  practically  see  it  administered.  "  We, 
five-sixths  of  the  people  of  the  United  States,  in  order  to  secure  a  union 
among  ourselves,  which  shall  make  the  other  sixth  curse  the  union,  and 
to  establish  justice  for  five-sixths  by  the  most  cruel  injustice  to  the  other 
sixth;  to  provide  for  the  common  defence  of  five-sixths,  by  taking  away 
all  public  and  private  defence  from  the  other  sixth ;  to  promote  the  parti 
cular  welfare  of  five-sixths  by  destroying  the  entire  welfare  of  the  other 
sixth  ;  to  secure  the  blessings  of  liberty  to  five-sixths,  and  the  curses  of 
never-ending  slavery  to  the  other  sixth,  we  do  ordain  this  Constitution  for 
the  United  States  of  America." 

What  would  the  adopters  in  the  thirteen  States  have  said  to  such  a  draft 
of  a  Constitution  ?  Most  of  the  thirteen  States,  on  organizing  the  conven 
tions  of  1788,  for  rejection  or  adoption,  would  have  resolved  to  have  let 
the  common  hangman  hang  this  Constitution  on  the  gallows,  with  carica 
tures  of  the  leaders  in  the  convention  of  1787,  and  closed  the  scene  by 
burning  it  up,  and  have  adjourned  sine  die.  Another  Convention  of  the 
United  States  would  have  been  called  by  an  indignant  people,  and  the 
first  article  would  have  abolished  slavery,  by  name,  in  the  United  States, 
as  an  everlasting  disturbing  cause,  no  longer  to  be  trusted  to  disgrace  our 
soil.  Many  seem  to  think,  we  derive  our  natural,  as  well  as  citizen, 
rights,  from  a  Constitution.  That,  said  MR.  S.,  cannot  be  so.  Our  natural 
rights  are  derived  from  our  Maker,  and  the  Constitution  is  like  a  fence 
around  them  to  protect  them  from  the  invasion  of  others.  Men  derive 
title  by  letters-patent  from  the  Supreme  -power  of  the  State,  to  their  land, 
and  the  fence  is  placed  around  it  to  protect  it  from  the  wandering  herd. 
Constitutions  may  also  be  said,  said  MR.  S.,  to  be  of  American  origin,  and 
it  is  not  possible  we  were  so  corrupt  in  the  morning  of  the  science.  To 
be  sure  England  talks  of  her  Constitution;  she  speaks  of  Magna  Charta 
obtained  by  fierce  and  ignorant  barons,  in  the  year  1215,  with  sword  in 
hand  from  feeble  John  ;  also  the  introduction  of  the  Protestant  religion, 
by  Henry  VIII.,  and  the  Revolution  of  1688,  and  some  other  important 
epochs  like  the  Reform  Bill,  which  added  to  the  current  stream  of  impe 
rial  Legislation,  all  considered,  being  "  moles  indigesta"  make  the  sum 
and  substance  of  what  an  Englishman  means  by  the  Constitution  of 
his  country.  France  made  several  Constitutions  during  the  political  par 
oxysms  and  revolutions  of  that  curious  people,  during  the  latter  end  of 
the  eighteenth  and  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  centuries,  but  at  last 
this  gallant  people  revolved  in  a  circle  of  elementary  expedients,  from 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY.  41 

1789  to  the  war  of  the  Barricades  in  1830,  making  organic  experiments, 
to  collect  the  true  sense  of  the  nation  respecting  the  safest  place  or  hands 
in  which  to  lodge  power,  from  which  the  greatest  amount  of  protection 
might  be  expected  with  the  least  burden  to  the  people.  Different  forms  of 
primal  law  were  submitted  to  the  people  for  adoption  or  rejection. 

But,  look  at  Russian,  Prussian,  German,  and  Italian  States ;  here  each 
person  is  looking  to  imperial,  royal,  or  ducal  prerogatives,  for  that  se 
curity  of  life,  liberty,  and  property,  which  should  never  have  been  ab 
sorbed  by  the  Crown,  but  should  always  have  constituted  a  fundamental 
layer  of  human  rights,  coming  from,  and  adopted  by  the  people,  as  their 
wall  of  defence. 

Our  Colonies  were  in  the  habit  of  receiving  gifts  of  a  political  character, 
carefully  sent  over  the  Atlantic  after  them,  in  grants,  patents,  bills  of 
rights,  and  charters;  the  very  rights  which  they  could  not  have  left 
behind  them,  and  been  men.  These  Constitutions,  anywhere  and  everywhere, 
as  a  general  rule,  are  made  to  defend  human  rights  and  not  to  crush 
them.  The  very  idea  of  a  Constitution  is  like  a  life-preserver,  made  to 
save  men  in  their  danger  in  the  water,  and  is  not  to  be  loaded  with  lead 
to  sink  them.  There  are  innumerable  modes  by  which  human  rights 
have  been  crushed,  without  calling  in  the  very  thing  which  should  pro 
tect  them,  with  which  to  accomplish  so  diabolical  a  purpose.  To  sup 
pose  ships  made  on  purpose  to  preserve  five-sixths,  and  expressly  to 
drown  the  other  sixth  who  sailed  in  them ;  the  bridge  to  precipitate  its 
sixth  passenger  over  it  into  the  river ;  is  not  more  absurd  in  supposition, 
tUan  to  suppose  a  United  States  Constitution  an  instrument  of  ruin  and 
destruction  to  every  sixth  man  who  sought  its  protection.  Instead  of  an 
asylum  he  finds  it  to  be  a  dungeon  with  fetters ;  that  he  is  to  be  bereav 
ed,  and  his  posterity  in  all  coming  generations,  of  all  capacity  to  have 
natural  rights;  the  forlorn  victims  of  avarice,  lust,  cruelty,  and  contempt ; 
himself,  property  owned,  and  in  the  most  abject  form,  shorn  of  the  power 
to  assert  the  strength  Heaven  gave  him  to  protect  his  most  valuable  rights. 
Rights !  Amazing !  he  has  no  rights  but  the  right  to  be  abused,  to  be  whip 
ped,  to  starve,  to  suffer,  and  to  die  ! !  This  idea  of  a  Constitution  being 
used  as  a  death-warrant  to  execute  human  rights,  is  a  horrid  solecism  ! 
incomprehensible,  yea,  a  sublime  absurdity ;  the  greatest  insult  ever 
offered  to  the  human  understanding;  and  certain  men  pretend  such 
is  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States.  If  the  Constitution  was  an  ani 
mated  being,  with  reason  and  a  voice,  said  MR.  S.,  and  were  you  to  ask 
her  to  speak  and  say,  was  she  made  to  uphold  slavery,  and  destroy 
human  rights,  she  would  answer,  "  As  to  slavery  I  know  not  what  you 
mean  by  the  word,  I  never  used  it  in  my  life ;  I  was  born  and  brought  into 
this  world  for  the  single  purpose  of  protecting  the  rights  of  persons,  de 
fending  men  from  the  violations  of  their  human  rights,  from  invasion 
from  abroad,  or  forceful  wrong  on  the  soil.  I  know  no  one,  except 
as  a  person  possessing  the  rights  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happi 
ness,  and  for  their  protection  I  put  forth  my  power.  When  the  free  men 
and  women  of  this  country  are  counted  as  a  basis  of  representation  in 
Congress  and  for  Presidential  Electors  (Indians  not  taxed  excepted),  and 
three-fifths  of  all  other  persons  are  to  be  counted,  and  if  States  or  indi 
viduals  call  those  three-fifths  slaves,  serfs,  or  connecting  links  between  men 
and  monkeys,  and  even  treat  them  as  such,  I  only  know  them  as  I  do 
the  rest  of  mankind,  as  persons  ;  my  eyes  can  only  see  men  as  persons, 
my  ears  can  only  hear  the  cry  of  men  as  persons,  possessed  of  natural 
rights.  I  cannot  be  used  to  destroy  the  liberties  of  any  innocent  man.  It 
is  not  within  the  range  of  my  power,  unless  I  am  perverted  to  purposes 
contrary  to  my  instincts."  Who  dare  affirm,  says  she,  that  1  guarantee 
slavery  and  make  compromises  for  its  support.  Oh !  says  she,  it  is  all 


4^  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

false,  it  is  directly  the  reverse  ;  I  guarantee  to  each  State  a  republican  form 
of  government,  which  confers  the  equal  right  of  life,  liberty,  and  property 
to  each  innocent  human  being  in  each  of  the  twenty-seven  States ;  that 
is  my  right,  my  power,  my  nature,  prerogative,  scope,  end,  and  object  of 
my  existence ;  and  slavery  exists  in  this  country  to  my  unutterable  confu 
sion,  by  my  violation  direct,  and  by  reason  of  the  people  of  this  land 
having  refused  to  allow  me  to  prostrate  slavery  through  the  judiciary  or 
Congress,  under  my  guarantee  of  a  republican  form  of  government  to  the 
States.  Persons  bound  to  service  or  labor  by  laws  of  one  State,  I  sny, 
shall  not  be  withheld,  but  shall  be  delivered  up  on  claim  of  him 
to  whom  such,  service  or  labor  is  due.  Here  I  deal  with  persons 
again.  If  the  wife,  the  son,  the  daughter,  the  apprentice,  the  prisoner 
from  his  bail,  escape  into  other  States,  I  order  all  of  these  persons 
to  be  delivered  to  the  husband,  or  the  father,  or  the  master,  or  their  bail, 
to  whom  such  labor  and  service  is  due,  and  for  this  purpose  I  am  a  per 
petual  treaty  between  the  States,  to  accomplish  these  just  objects,  and  save 
the  effusion  o£  blood.  If,  says  the  Constitution,  a  slave  is  not  a  person 
within  the  protection  which  I  afford  to  all  persons  where  I  say  "  no  person 
shall  be  deprived  of  life,  liberty,  or  property,  without  due  process  of 
law,"  then  he  is  a  being  I  have  no  right  to  touch  and  deliver  up,  for  I  can 
only  deliver  up  persons  bound  to,  or  who  owe  service  or  labor  as  persons 
and  not  as  slaves  ;  and  if  these  persons  are  slaves,  then  I  am  under  the 
most  solemn  promise  and  obligation  not  to  explain  away,  but  to  see  that 
slave-persons,  if  you  please,  are  not  deprived  of  life  or  libertv,  without 
due  process  of  law,  which  must  have  been  some  distinct  adjudication 
that  the  being  was  a  slave  by  a  court,  acting  on  the  principles  of  the  com 
mon  law.  No  such  court  has  been  organized  in  this  land,  no  such  judg 
ments  have  been  rendered.  If  he  is  within  the  protection  of  the  magnacharta 
part  of  my  character,  then  I  will  not  deliver  the  man  to  his  master,  as  you 
are  pleased  to  call  him,  until  a  judgment  of  some  kind,  showing  that  the 
man  owes  service  to  another,  and  has  been  deprived  of  his  liberty  by  due 
process  of  law.  Some  record  of  that  kind  must  be  shown,  or  I  cannot 
deliver  him  up. 

Said  MR.  S.,  I  demand  that  these  persons  be  delivered  up  to  enjoy  their 
liberty,  on  the  ground  of  the  declaration  in  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States  declaring  that  "  no  person  shall  be  deprived  of  life,  liberty,  or  prop 
erty,  without  due  process  of  law."  There  is  not  a  slave  or  servant,  so 
held,  of  the  four  thousand  of  both  sorts  in  New  Jersey,  but  what  are 
entitled  to  their  'liberty  by  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States. 

Said  MR.  S.,  it  is  a  curious  and  a  ridiculous  idea  of  some,  that  our 
fathers  had  secret  thoughts  of  crime  against  man,  which  they  had  not  the 
courage  to  express,  under  the  name  of  intentions,  when  they  drafted  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States  ;  and  that  we,  out  of  respect  to  the 
unrecorded,  unwritten,  villanous  intentions,  and  wicked  wishes  of  our 
venerable  ancestors,  should  take  those  wicked  thoughts  and  unrecorded 
intentions  of  crime  against  the  rights  of  man,  as  our  Contsitmion,  under 
the  idea  of  intention,  rather  than  the  beautiful  text  itself,  so  full 
of  life,  liberty,  and  justice.  Said  MR.  S.,  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States,  on  its  own  face,  is  safe,  and  more  to  be  relied  on  to  explain  its 
own  meaning  with  justice  to  the  framers,  adopters,  and  us,  their  posterity, 
than  all  we  could  learn  from  each  drafter  and  each  adopter,  could  we 
summon  them  before  a  court  of  justice  to  explain  it  as  they  understood 
it,  on  the  4th  of  March,  1789,  the  day  it.  went  into  operation.  To  be 
sure,  if  the  adopters  ever  thought  of  slavery,  they  did  not  think  to  name 
it,  and  must  have  supposed  it  near  its  end,  and  they  did  not  wish  to  dis 
grace  the  nation  by  the  admission  that  so  foul  and  base  a  thing  ever  exist 
ed.  This  is  truly  lamentable,  to  think  the  human  mind  is  yet  in  such  a  low 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  43 

state  of  civilization,  that  from  this  point  to  enter  goose-hood,  would  be 
elevation,  and  that  men  should  delight  to  lay  hold  of  absurd  views,  as  the 
one  exposed,  to  justify  themselves  in  the  perversion  of  that  glorious 
instrument,  to  some  low  and  grovelling  purpose,  pecuniary  or  political. 

MR.  S.  said  that  he  felt  mortified  to  think  it  should  be  necessary  for 
him,  in  the  19th  century,  to  stand  in  Republican  America,  the  live-long 
day,  before  one  of  the  highest  courts  in  intellect,  learning,  and  station, 
to  prove  a  human  being  a  man,  and  not  a  thing.  The  proposition  that 
the  colored  people  of  this  State  held  in  bondage,  are  men,  born  free  and 
independent,  by  the  law  of  nature,  is  one  above  all  demonstration,  out 
strips  all  logical  deductions,  and  addresses  itself  to  our  every  perception, 
for  its  truth,  which  can  gain  nothing  from  analogy,  and  borrow  noth 
ing  from  illustration,  comparison  cannot  aid  in  its  development,  and 
similes  cannot  make  it  more  clear  to  the  human  mind.  Antiquity  and 
to-day  utter  the  same  response.  It  is  the  same  yesterday,  to-day  and 
forever.  Every  degree  of  latitude  and  longitude  renders  the  same  verdict, 
whether  at  Timbuctoo  or  at  Trenton;  whether  in  mind,  or  in  body,  for 
time  or  eternity,  they  are  men  and  women,  creatures  of  hope,  gazing  on 
the  same  bright,  strong,  beautiful  and  ancient  Heavens,  on  which  Adam 
and  Solomon,  Daniel  and  Paul,  Copernicus  and  Columbus,  turned  their 
admiring  eyes ;  the  frames  of  colored  men,  their  human  countenance 
divine,  containing  the  same  unerased  lineaments,  vindicating  in  celestial 
heraldry  the  grandeur  of  their  descent,  the  greatness  of  their  origin — 
showing  that  God  is  their  Father,  that  all  men  are  brethren  of  one  blood, 
that  the  sweets  of  life,  the  joy  of  liberty,  the  hope  and  pursuit  of  happi 
ness,  are  the  gifts  of  the  Great  Father,'  to  all,  and  each  of  his  children, 
with  a  power  ami  privilege  for  ever  to  climb  the  ascending  heights  of 
eternity,  through  the  merits  of  His  Son,  increasing  in  happiness  and 
knowledge,  through  the  endless  day  of  Heaven. 

Said  MR.  S.,  the  greatest  announcement  affecting  the  interests  of  man 
ever  made  since  the  advent  of  the  Redeemer,  was  the  synopsis  of  the 
rights  of  man,  made  by  the  immortal  signers  of  the  Declaration  of  Inde 
pendence,  on  the  4th  day  of  July,  1776. 

The  announcement  was  antagonistic  to  the  opinions  of  all  former  ages, 
and  the  then  existing  powers  of  this  world.  Russel,  Sidney,  Milton, 
Cromwell,  and  Locke,  were  permitted  to  ascend  the  mount  of  discovery, 
and  behold,  as  by  prophetic  sight,  in  the  land  of  the  setting  sun,  beyond 
the  vast  Atlantic/a  people  asserting  what  these  philosophers  believed ;  that 
all  men  were  created  free  and  equal,  and  possessed  of  certain  inalienable 
rights,  amongst  which  were  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness. 
What  they  hoped  for  man,  we  have  seen  and  heard.  When  this  sublime 
declaration  was  made  on  the  4th  of  July,  1776,  it  was  high  treason,  and 
political  atheism,  in  every  other  Government  on  earth. 

To  all  other  governments  with  birth-born  kings,  birth-born  legislators, 
birth-born  judges,  this  declaration  of  the  American  revolutionists  was  a 
thousand  times  more  formidable,  said  MR.  S.,  than  war  or  revolution 
itself.  This  was  a  great  fundamental  proposition,  placing  all  men  on  a 
level,  and  as  equals,  in  the  start  of  the  journey  of  existence ;  stating  the 
value,  the  riches  of  their  elemental  capital,  which  no  insolvency  could 
divest,  no  bankruptcy  carry  away.  Slavery,  or  the  inheritable  dominion 
of  man  over  man,  with  its  complicated  train  of  truckling  dependencies, 
artificial  distinctions,  the  iron-railing  of  caste,  were  in  one  day,  by  the 
great  proposition  of  the  4th  of  July,  struck  down  as  false  in  principle. 
This  was  the  sentiment  of  a  New  World,  and  the  signers  of  the  great 
human  being  postulatum,  spoke  for  themselves,  and  the  unborn  nations  of 
this  great  continent,  representing  this  great  Americanism  of  the  new 
hemisphere.  The  glorious  sound  went  careering  through  the  world,  that 


44 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 


all  men  are  created  free  and  equal.  The  Massachusetts  slave  heard  its 
music,  and  joined  in  the  chorus,  and  his  freedom  was  confessed.  The 
slaves  of  New  York  and  Pennsylvania  listened  to  the  joyful  acclaim  ;  the 
man-chattel  of  New  Hampshire  caught  the  still-small  voice,  and  joined  in 
thanks  to  Heaven,  that  all  were  free.  Congress  caught  the  sound,  and 
said,  the  African  slave-trade  should  cease  on  our  part  for  ever,  and  that 
no  slave  should  tread  the  States  of  Ohio,  Illinois,  Indiana,  Michigan,  and 
the  territories  of  Wisconsin  and  Iowa.  The  angel  of  deliverance  flew 
with  the  mighty  scroll  in  her  right  hand  over  valley  and  mountain  to  the 
vast  lands  of  Mexico,  and  proclaimed  from  the  surnmic  of  her  smoking 
volcanos,  that  all  men  were  born  free  and  equal ;  and  in  one  day,  50,000 
black  slaves,  and  two  millions  of  enslaved  Indians,  in  their  repartimentos, 
in  the  mountains,  in  the  mines,  in  the  workshops,  and  on  the  roads,  in 
their  chains,  heard  the  glorious  decree,  and  they  all  in  chorus  joined,  and 
sung,  "  that  all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,"  and  in  that  instant  they 
stood  up  free.  The  angel  cried  again  in  Guatirnala  and  Peru,  from  the 
depth  of  the  blue  heavens,  "  that  all  men  were  created  free."  The  black 
and  red  slave  heard  his  voice,  from  the  mountain  and  the  mine,  the 
hill  and  the  hollow,  that  all  men  were  created  free  and  equal,  and  their 
fetters  fell  from  their  delivered  hands  as  they  lifted  them  to  Heaven ;  and 
then  they  sung,  "all  men  are  created  free  and  equal,"  for  they  were 
free. 

Along  upon  the  mighty  Andes  the  angel  flew,  and  from  Chimborazo's  icy 
top,  she  cried  again  so  loud  and  long,  that  the  tens  of  thousands  of  poor 
bondsmen  of  Chili  heard,  some  in  those  mi  visited  regions,  subterranean, 
damp,  dreary,  digging  gold  ore  and  veins  of  silver,  far  under  the  floor  of  the 
roaring  Pacific,  who  never  saw  light;  while  others  were  delving  in  the 
depths  and  bowels  of  the  Andes,  to  satisfy  the  accursed  thirst  of  gold ;  others 
in  smelting-houses  loaded  with  chains ;  others  driving,  as  serfs,  their  master's 
flocks  of  goats  and  sheep  on  the  mountain's  side,  and^the  loaded  mule  along; 
others  with  loads  upon  their  heads,  in  the  rounds  of  common  life,  who  wore 
out  their  being  for  thankless  masters;  others  to  galleys  chained ;  others 
bound  to  posts,  whose    backs  were  being  scourged ;  others  in  a  defer 
ential  form  were  listening  to  the  raging  words  of  graceless  masters.     All 
heard  the  long,  the  loud  trumpet  sound,  "  that  all  men  were  created  free 
and  equal."     All  around  the  whips  and  fetters  fell,  and  in   one  joyful 
hour,  in  time,  up  went  the  glorious  chorus  of  response  from  men  who 
were  slaves  no  more,  who  said  and  sung  "all  men  are  created  free  and 
equal."     The  joyful  proclamation,  by  the  angel  made,  and  the  sublime 
chorus,  and  humanity's  reply,  rolled  over  the  great  mountain,  and  down  its 
eastern  slant,  and  the  slaves  of  Guayaquil,  Columbia,  Venezuela,  and 
Bolivia,  learnt  to  sing  the  holy  notes,  "  that  all  men  are  created  free  and 
equal ;"  and  in  one  day  deliverance  came  to  all  these  sons  of  sorrow  and 
of  toil.     The  angel  then  to  the  West  Indies  flew,  and  the  men  of  Hayti 
said,  throughout  that  Island,  all  men  are  free,  and  one  million  stood  up 
enfranchised ;  the  anthem  of  deliverance  was  sung  in  each  British  Isle 
on  the  1st  of  August,  1838,  and  800,000  slaves  in  one  moment  became 
800,000  British  Freemen.     The  angel  flew  to  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  and 
sung  her  celestial  song,  and  in  one  day,  100,000  bondmen  cried  from  the 
Cape  inland  600  miles  East  and  West,  from  sea  to  sea,  "  we  all  are  free." 
The  angel  balanced  on  his  pinions,  flew  and  cried  in  the  ears  of  the  Bey  of 
Tunis,  and  in  the  Egyptian  Ali  Pasha's,  "  that  all  men  are  created  free  and 
equal."   These  sons  of  Mahomet  heard,  and  the  Heaven-made-decree  obey 
ed,  and  in  those  lands  of  darkness  and  of  death,  in  one  day  each  slave  cried 
out,  "  I  am  free  !    I  am  free  !"     On  the  1st  of  April,  1844,  the  angel  of  peace 
and  good  will  towards  men,  blew  a  louder  and  longer  blast  than  he  ever 
yet  had  done  ;  it  was  heard  over  the  hundred  millions  of  the  East  Indies, 


SLAVERY   IN   NEW   JERSEY. 


45 


saying  "  all  men  were  created  free  and  equal."  In  a  moment  the  here 
ditary  serf,  the  caste-marked  million,  and  slaves  by  descent,  for  ages, 
in  all  12,000,000  told, started  into  life  and  joy,  amidst  rattling  chains  and 
broken  fetters  falling  from  them,  their  eyes  streaming  with  tears,  grateful 
to  Heaven  as  they  flowed,  and  they  all  joined  in  the  glorious  song  which 
they  now  sung,  "  that  all  men  are  created  free,"  and  "  that  they  were 
slaves  no  more !" 

Said  MR.  S  ,  we  live  in  an  abolition  age,  when  the  dungeons  which 
have  incarcerated  suffering  humanity,  are  being  broken  in,  and  unlocked  in 
every  corner  of  our  benighted  world,  and  the  captive  bid  come  forth ; 
and  may  I  entreat  this  Honorable  Court  to  share  in  the  unfading  glory  of 
opening  this  castle  of  slavery,  New  Jersey,  with  the  key  of  the  new  Con 
stitution,  and  the  other  keys  he  had  the  honor  to  submit  to  this  Court, 
by  which  to  let  oppressed  men  go  free. 

Here  MR.  S.  closed  his  opening  argument,  having  spoken  until  six 
o'clock  P.  M. 

The  Court  adjourned  until  Thursday  morning,  at  ten  o'clock,  A.  M.  The 
Court  met  at  ten  o'clock  A.  M.,  on  the  22d  of  May,  and  Chief  Justice 
HORNBLOWER  made  a  very  able,  eloquent,  and  affecting  address,  to  two 
fine  looking  young  men,  who  were  sentenced  to  be  executed  in  August 
next,  for  the  murder  of  Parke  and  Rasner. 

At  eleven  o'clock  A.  M.,  MR.  ZABRISKIE  opened  his  argument  for  the 
defence  of  the  Claimants  of  these  persons,  and  spoke  till  half  after  one, 
with  a  good  deal  of  talent  and  power.  The  Court  adjourned  until  three 
o'clock  P.  M.  MR.  ZABRISKIE  resumed,  and  concluded  at  half  after  three, 
P.  M. 

MR.  BRADLEY,  as  Counsel  for  the  Claimants,  spoke  with  much  energy 
and  ingenuity  until  five  o'clock  P.  M.,  when  he  closed. 

MR. "STEWART  replied  from  five  o'clock  P.  M.  to  six.  The  Court 
adjourned  until  seven,  P.  M.,  and  MR.  STEWART  spoke  from  seven  P.  M., 
until  half  after  ten,  and  closed. 

It  is  regretted  that  the  arguments  of  Messrs.  ZABRISKIE  and  BRADLEY,  could 
not  have  been  given  at  length,  but  many  of  the  points  which  they  made 
will  appear  in  MR.  STEWART'S  reply.  It  is  not  expected  we  should 
report  all  MR.  S.  said,  first  and  last,  in  eleven  hours  of  delivery. 

MR.  STEWART  said  in  reply,  that  he  must  express  his  gratitude  to  the 
learned  Counsel,  for  the  kind  compliments  paid  to  his  intellect,  by  one 
who  had  given  us  so  strong  evidence,  that  he  himself  enjoyed  the  singular 
fortune  of  a  fine  mind,  embellished  with  the  advantages  of  a  polished 
education,  and  what  he  could  not  command  from  research,  he  might  still 
enjoy  by  the  power  of  reflection. 

MR.  S.  said  the  learned  Counsel  had  alluded  to  the  fact,  that  the  first 
person  they  had  seen  alive,  who  was  an  abolitionist,  in  the  county  of 
Bergen,  was  the  person,  who  served  these  writs  of  Habeas  Corpus,  MR. 
PALMER,  and  the  Counsel  gravely  informs  us,  that  the  people  did  not  tar 
and/i?crfAer  him.  Said  MR.  S.,  1  suppose  this  statement  is  made  as  a  dis 
tinguished  compliment  to  his  neighbors  in  that  county,  and  as  the  highest 
proof  they  have  ever  given  of  their  civilisation ;  and  i't  is  to  be  hoped  they 
may  never,  in  an  evil  hour,  fall  below  this  high  water  mark  of  their 
advancing  elevation.  MR.  ZABRISKIE  has  told  us,  to  frighten  and  almost 
alarm  us  out  of  this  effort  in  behalf  of  crushed  men,  and  to  make  us  leave 
these  slaves  in  the  great  man -trap,  that  if  your  Honors  let  those  slaves 
go  free  under  your  new  Constitution,  the  Courts  will  be  compelled  to 
hear  arguments  by  wives  and  children,  to  be  set  free  from  the  dominion 
of  their  husbands  and  parents.  The  bare  statement  of  so  strange  a  pro 
position  relievos  me  from  a  reply  to  it.  The  gentleman  has  endeavored 
to  ^larm  the  sensibilities  of  the  Court,  by  a  parade  of  several  distinct 


46  SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY. 

orders  of  modern  philosophers,  known  under  the  name  of  Fouriers,  Anti- 
Reuters,  Socialists,  Ovvcnites,  Fanny  Wrightcrs,  Non-Resistants,  and  No- 
Humau-Govemment-men,  Dissolvers  of  the  Union,  Nullifiers,  and  Infidels. 
And  he  would  wish  to  fasten  the  opinion  upon  the  Court,  that  there  is 
some  sort  of  relation  between  these  philosophers' views  and  this  dry  law 
question,  which  is,  whether  slavery -in  the  State  of  New  Jersey,  is  a  legal 
and  lawful  institution  or  not.  I  confess  I  cannot  discover  any  more  rela 
tion  between  the  philosophical  dogmas  of  these  different  philosophers, 
than  tlu're  is  propriety  in  the  following  question:  "  If  it  is  two  hundred 
miles  from  this  place  to  Boston,  what  is  the  amount  of  the  first  quarter's 
salary  of  the  Lord  Mayor  of  London?"  I  think  when  the  pertinency  of 
one  of  these  propositions  is  made  manifest,  the  other  will  then  appear. 

But,  said  MR.  S.,  as  there  have  been  several  attempts  to  lock  and  hook 
together  during  the  gentleman's  reply,  things  the  most  dissimilar   and 
uncongenial,  I  will  take,  if  the  Court  permit,  the  present  opportunity  to 
define  'the  liberty  party  abolitionists'  creed,  a  body  of  men  who,  at  the 
late  election,  appeared  to  number  about  62,500  voting  men,  of  which  body 
the  speaker  was  an  humble  member.     The  liberty  party  abolitionists,  m 
the  United  States,  had  been  a  political  party,  with  its  candidates,  ever 
since  April,  1840;  and  was  formed  from  necessity,  to  overthrow  slavery, 
after  having  tried  both  of  the  old  parties  in  vain,  each  of  the  old  parties 
having  a  slave  end  to  it,  so  it  was  impossible  to  get  either  to  undertake 
this  work.     The  liberty  party  hold  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States 
to  be,  when  properly  interpreted,  an  anti-slavery  document,  replete  with 
tendencies  in  favor  of  freedom;  but  that  the  slaveholding  portion  of  this 
country  have  seized  upon  the  reins  of  government,  and  perverted  the  Con 
stitution's  high  intent,  to  the  base  purposes  of  sustaining,  and  increasing 
the  power  of  slaveholders  in  every  possible  way,  and  have  violated  the 
Constitution  by  employing  it  to  sanction  slavery  in  many  ways,  and  in  the 
overthrow  of  the  right  of  petition.     The  liberty  party  abolitionists  mean 
to  employ  the  Constitution,  and  in  pursuance  of  its  authority,  and  not  con 
trary  thereto,  to  overthrow  slavery  in  every  way,  and  by  all  lawful  means. 
We  mean  as  a  body,  and  it  is  a  part  of  our  creed,  to  cling  to  the  Union  or 
Confederacy  under  all  circumstances,  and  never  give  it  up  ;  slavery  in,  or 
slavery  out,  Texas  in  or  Texas  out:  we  hold  on  to  the  Union  and  every 
acre  of  its  soil,  whether  it  be  the  sands  of  Georgia  or  the  mountains  of 
Vermont,  for  the  exaltation,  purification,  and  enfranchisement  of  this  land 
from  slavery,  root  and  branch.     It  is  a  cardinal  principle  from  the  begin 
ning,  never  to  vote  for  a  slaveholder,  or  an  apologist  of  slavery.^  but  hold 
it  our  duty  to  vote  at  every  election  for  men  for  town,  county,  State,  and 
national  officers,  who  will  employ  all  lawful  power  to  banish  slavery  from 
the  nation,  for  the  sake  of  three  millions  of  slaves  compelled  to  work 
without  wages,  as  well  as  three  millions  of  ignorant,  poor,  and  unschooled 
whites  in  the  South,  the  lazaroni  of  this  continent,  who  are  ruined  by  the 
most  abject  poverty,  it  being  disgraceful,  for  them  to  labor  for  wages  by 
the  side  of  the  slave.     To  save  six  millions  of  human  beings  from  ruin 
or  desolation,  or  one-third  of  our  countrymen,  is  the  exact  object  of  the 
liberty  party  abolitionists,  let  it  take  ever  so  long  to  accomplish  it.     We 
have  no  motive  for  advancing  the  one,  or  retarding  the  other  of  the  great 
parties,  as  we  mean,  in  the  end,  to  overthrow  them  both  as  soon  as  we  can 
get  our  countrymen  to  adopt  our  belief;  we  are  law-abiding  and  law-sus 
taining  men,  and  there  is  no  more  connection  between   the  liberty  party 
abolitionists,  and  the  list  of  philosophers  just  enumerated,  than  there  is 
between  the  Chinese  wall  and  the  Erie  canal.     We  believe  in   short,  a 
man  has  a  better  right  to  his  own  wife  and  children,  than  any  other  man  , 
and  we  suppose  the  curse  of  slavery  has,  as  a  mass,  nearly  ruined  the 
men  of  the  South,  as  well  as  the  land  of  the  slave  States,  and  we  wish  to 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  47 

improve  and  save  our  country  and  our  people,  by  our  party  organization. 
And  my  apology  to  the  Court  for  this  statement,  defining  our  position, 
is,  said  MR.  S.,  the  attempt  to  injure  and  dishonor  as  high-minded  and 
pure  body  of  men  as  breathes,  by  making  them  keep  company  with  those 
philosophers,  however  respectable  they  may  be  ;  yet  we  have  not  chosen 
their  society,  or  opinions,  in  the  prosecution  of  our  enterprise.  The 
counsel  of  defendant,  said  MR.  S.,  has  attacked  New  York  for  calling 
a  State  Convention, — I  can  see  nothing  ULTRA  or  radical,  once  in  a 
quarter  of  a  century,  in  a  State's  reviewing  the  ground  it  has  passed  over, 
and  thus  lay  hold  of  the  improvements  time  suggests,  or  brings  to  light, 
for  perfecting  her  great  social  edifice.  The  old  way  to  amend  the  fabric 
of  government  in  "Europe,  was  on  the  battle-field,  amidst  the  clangor  of 
arms  and  roar  of  artillery,  with  bullets  for  yeas,  and  cannon  balls  for  nays. 
Mr.  S.  confessed  he  much  preferred  the  mode  adopted  by  the  State  of 
New  York.  The  learned  counsel,  to  get  rid  of  the  force  of  the  first  Article 
of  the  new  Constitution  of  this  State,  says  it  is  a  mere  abstraction,  a  rhe 
torical  flourish,  and  is  not  a  part  of  the  Constitution,  in  reality,  not  binding 
us  to  do  anything.  Said  MR.  S.,  I  should  like  to  know  where  I  am  to 
begin  to  read  the  new  Constitution,  and  how  much  of  it  is  to  be  rejected 
as  surplussage  ? 

The  other  counsel,  MR.  BRADLEY,  says  this  section  of  the  Constitution 
is  a  mere  braggadocio,  a  mere  telling  England  that  all  men  are  free  and 
independent  by  nature,  and  it  is  so  said,  to  let  England  know  that  our 
people  know  that  we  are  as  good  as  her  Lords  and  Commons,  Kings  and 
Queens,  and  that  it  grew  out  of  our  revolutionary  jealousy,  of  onr  own 
importance,  when  we  first  inserted  it,  in  the  Declaration  of  Independence. 
Said  MR.  S.,  this  is  queer  indeed  !  New  Jersey,  in  her  old  Constitution,  made 
two  days  before  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  was  perfectly  silent 
then ;  when  the  reason  for  bragging  might  have  operated,  she  is  very 
meek  then  ;  not  one  word  is  said  about  human  rights ;  but  68  years  after 
wards  in  September,  1844,  when  all  danger  is  for  ever  passed,  according 
to  the  gentleman,  New  Jersey  sticks  up  her  bristles,  and  says,  "  I  would 
have  you  know,  old  England,  yes,  old  John  Bull,  and  you  Miss  Victoria 
Guelph,  and  Mr.  Albert  Coburg,  that  we  are  as  good  by  nature,  and  as 
independent  as  any  of  you,  yes,  that  we  be."  But  the  sober-minded,  brave, 
and  considerate  Jerseyman  never  had  such  a  thought  pass  through  his 
mind,  at  the  time  he  voted  for  its  adoption.  He  had  too  much  regard  for 
his  own  dignity,  and  too  much  respect  for  England,  to  employ  himself  in 
such  a  miserable  small  game  of  swelling  and  surf-making,  to  elevate  the 
character  of  his  country.  The  noble-minded  Jerseyman  is  willing  that 
other  countries  should  amuse  themselves  with  the  baubles  of  kings, 
queens,  and  lords,  as  national  dolls  and  play-things,  without  considering 
himself  undervalued  in  the  least  by  not  being  used  for  the  same  puerile 
and  harmless  purpose  by  his  own  countrymen;  and  the  last  place  in  the 
world  he  would  seek  to  curl  the  lip  of  scorn,  would  be  in  his  own  great 
fundamental  and  organic  law,  asserting  his  own  freedom,  dignity,  and 
independence.  Said  MR.  S.,  MR.  B.  contends  that  Moses'  law  sanctioned 
slavery,  and  the  buying-  the  heathen  around  about  for  money.  Yes,  there 
was  a  kind  of  servitude  which  looks  like  the  buying  the  heathen  by  those 
ancient  Jews  for  money.  But,  said  MR.  S.,  the  Jewish  government  was  a 
theocracy,  and  everyl  aw,  decree,  or  order  of  government,  began  with 
"Thus  saith  the  Lord,"  as  a  standing  formula ;  whether  the  document,  law, 
or  proclamation,  came  from  the  elders,  a  king,  a  general,  or  a  high-priest, 
from  a  good  man,  or  bad  one,  whoever  had  occasion  to  employ  the 
character  of  the  government,  as  that  was  a  theocracy,  and  these  rulers 
always  used  "  Thus  saith  the  Lord,"  as  a  universal  preface  to  the  law. 
All  of  Moses'  laws  were  not  from  God ;  but  Moses*  system  was  a  code  of 


48  SLAVERY    IN    NEW   JERSEY. 

particulars,  some  from  God,  and  others  from  man.  The  Saviour  settles 
this  question  in  the  case  of  that  law  of  Moses,  by  which  a  man  might 
live  with  his  wife,  a  month  after  marriage  and  if  he  did  not  like  her,  then 
gave  her  a  bill  of  divorcement,  and  sent  her  away,  however  virtuous  and 
he  worthy.  The  Saviour  says,  "  Moses  suffered  it  from  the  hardness  of  your 
hearts,  it  was  not  so  in  the  beginning,"  &c.  Now,  said  MR.  S.,  this 
month  divorce ;  the  case  of  a  Jew  being  permitted  to  take  a  cow,  or  an 
ox,  which  had  suddenly  died,  to  the  gates  of  the  city,  and  there  sell  it  to 
the  heathen  and  strangers  to  eat  (forbidding  the  Jews  to  eat  it),  also  the 
case  of  taking  interest  of  the  heathen,  and  none  of  a  Jew.  Polygamy  is 
a  fourth  case,  and  the  fifth  is  a  man's  making  his  captive  into  a  wife,  living 
with  her  as  long  as  he  pleased,  and  then  setting  her  adrift,  as  in 
the  21st  chapter  of  Deuteronomy,  all  of  these  cases  have  thus  "  Saith 
the  Lord,"  as  much  as  good  laws.  These  laws  Moses  suffered  this 
ignorant  people  to  adopt  as  a  matter  of  expediency,  but  they  were  not 
the  laws  of  God,  but  are  properly  recorded,  as  our  laws  formerly  in  New 
York  were,  in  favor  of  lotteries,  and  regulating  Long  Island  horse-races. 
But  the  terrible  injustice  of  these  laws,  proves  that  man  was  their  author, 
and  not  God;  but  they  are  recorded  under  the  general  appellation  of 
"  thus  saith  the  Lord,"  because  the  Government  was  a  Theocracy.  This 
view,  MR.  S.  believed  necessary,  to  vindicate  the  purity  and  glory  of 
God.  There  was  a  law  of  Heavenly  origin  which  said,  "  whoso  stealeth 
a  man  shall  surely  die  or  be  put  to  death,"  which  form  he  did  not  recol 
lect,  and  is  found  in  these  same  chapters.  He,  MR  S.,  did  not  see  how 
that  law  of  God  could  be  reconciled  with  American  slavery ;  for  every 
man  and  woman,  or  his  or  her  ancestor,  had  been  stolen  in  this  country. 
Again,  if  slavery  is  a  Bible  and  Heavenly  institution,  we  should  not  be 
opposed  to  it  in  the  abstract,  as  the  defendant's  counsel  are,  but  everything 
should  be  done  to  foster  and  encourage  it,  and  their  honors  should  resign 
their  seats  rather  than  decide  in  MR.  S's  favor,  however  plain  the  new 
Constitution  or  other  thing  might  be  for  the  slave  ;  for  if  the  Bible  coun 
tenances  slavery,  it  is  abstractly  right,  and  the  plaintiffs  counsel  com 
mits  a  great  sin  in  opposing  slavery  in  the  abstract,  which  they  intend  to 
atone  for  by  going  with  alf  their  might  for  it  practically,  and  thus  purge 
themselves  for  opposing  what  the  Bible  sustains  in  the  abstract  and  con 
crete.  If  it  is  a  Bible  institution,  which  we  have  been  abolishing  in 
New  England,  New  York,  and  Pennsylvania,  let  us  repent  in  dust  and 
ashes,  and  run  down  all  the  colored,  the  weak,  the  young,  the  Irish,  the 
English,  and  the  strangers  on  their  first  arrival ,  and  catch  our  few  suffer 
ing  Indians,  who  are  still  straggling  as  wanderers  among  their  fathers' 
graves,,  and  make  them  all  into  slaves,  and  their  posterity  in  the  free 
States;  and  thus  secure  the  blessings  of  Heaven,  that  are  poured  out  so 
bountifully  on  Virginia,  Maryland  and  the  Carolinas. 

Mr.  S.  said  that  of  all  remarkable  arguments  for  ingenuity,  he  had 
heard  one  urged  by  both  of  his  learned  and  ingenious  adversaries,  and, 
in  fact,  the  main  one,  on  which  they  sought  to  continue  the  institution  of 
slavery,  in  this  State,  which  surprised,  yes,  astonished  him,  by  its  subtlety 
and  cruelty.  In  the  1st  section  of  the  10th  Article  of  the  new  Constitution 
of  New  Jersey,  among-  other  things,  it  says,  "  The  common  law  and  statute 
laws  now  in  force,  and  not  repugnant  to  this  Constitution,  shall  remain  in 
force  until  they  expire  by  their  own  limitation,  or  be  altered  or  repealed 
by  the  legislature;  and  all  writs,  actions,  causes  of  action,  prosecutions, 
contracts,  claims,  and  rights  of  individuals,  and  of  bodies  corporate,  and 
of  the.  State,  and  all  charters  of  incorporation,  shall  continue,  and  all  m- 
dictments  which  shall  have  been  found,  or  may  hereafter  be  found  for  any 
crime  or  offence  committed  before  the  adoption  of  this  Constitution,  may 
be  proceeded  upon,  as  though  no  change  had  taken  place." 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  49 

The  point  the  defendant's  counsel  would  raise,  is  this  ;  admitting  that 
the  new  Constitution  has  abolished  the  old  slave  laws,  root  and  branch,  as 
being  "  repugnant"  to  the  new  Constitution ;  still  under  the  name  of 
"  claims  and  rights  of  individuals"  which  "  should  continue,"  the  rights  of 
master  and  slave  are  both  preserved  in  the  1st  section  of  the  10th  Article 
of  the  new  Constitution  under  the  head  of  "  rights  preserved,"  as  defend 
ant's  counsel  contend.  The  counsel  further  contend  for  defendants,  that  it  is 
good  law  without  such  saving  clause  in  the  Constitution ;  and  that  all  rights 
are  preserved,  notwithstanding  a  constitution,  hostile  to  them  on  its  face,  has 
abolished  the  laws  which  created  the  rights,  in  so  many  words,  totidem  verbis. 

Said  MR.  S.,  I  deny  these  propositions  in  toto,  as  applied  to  a  case  of 
slavery.  Reserved  rights  !  said  MR.  S.,  they  would  be  reserved  wrongs !  and 
upon  that  principle  a  State  could  not  abolish  slavery,  as  for  instance,  sup 
pose  South  Carolina  makes  a  new  Constitution,  and  abolishes  slavery,' 
and  with,  or  without  a  reservation  of  the  rights  of  the  citizens  ;  according 
to  the  argument  we  hear,  the  rights  of  the  master  are  all  taken  up  and 
preserved  in  the  new  Constitution,  to  the  services  of  the  slaves  ,  the  rights 
of  sale  of  labor,  or  sale  of  the  slaves,  or  their  offspring,  are  the  same  as 
before.  They  alter  this  Constitution  again,  and  re-assert,  ten  years  after 
wards,  that  slavery  shall  never  exist  in  South  Carolina ;  but  the  planter 
smiles  at  the  imbecility  of  the  Convention,  and  says,  although  they  have 
for  the  second  time  abolished  slavery  by  the  Constitution,  and  all  laws 
which  maintain  it,  yet  according  to  the  arguments  of  the  defendant's 
counsel,  in  New  Jersey,  my  rights  are  all  preserved  to  the  slaves,  and 
that  is  all  I  ask;  and  furthermore,  says  he,  it  is  curious  to  see  how  the 
body  of  this  glorious  institution  of  slavery  survives  its  own  decapitation. 
They  cannot,  says  he,  abolish  slavery,  even  in  a  Constitution  made  on 
purpose,  but  the  Divine  rights  of  slavery  will  survive,  and  ride  careering 
over  all  human  attempts  at  their  annihilation ;  and  what,  says  the  South 
Carolina  planter,  is  the  peculiar  beauty  of  this  proposition,  is,  that  by  the  uni 
versal  admission  of  all  jurists,  slavery  can  only  exist  by  positive  law,  for  its 
support ;  but,  says  he,  I  have  now  discovered  how  it  may  exist  without  posi 
tive  law  for  its  support,  but  in  deadly  opposition  to  the  most  stringent 
organic  Constitutional  Law,  for  its  entire  abolition  and  express  destruction. 
Once  in  a  nation,  and  adopted  by  law,  no  form  of  law  can  banish  it,  as  it  lives 
under  the  name  of  a  "  right  preserved ;"  yes,  it  lives  and  flourishes  with 
an  endless  life.  It  is  the  real  "  live-for-ever."  Yes,  if  this  argument  is 
sound,  the  most  monstrous  wrong  in  the  universe,  for  who&e  destruction 
a  new  Constitution  was  expressly  made,  flourishes  and  prevails ;  yes, 
lo  !  the  melancholy  spectacle  is  presented  to  the  astonished  world,  that 
although  the  laws  sustaining  slavery  are  all  abolished,  yet  slavery  has  a 
more  solemn  and  formidable  protection,  as  a  reserved  right,  than  it  ever 
had  before,  and  that  too  in  the  bosom  of  its  own  executioner.  The  coun 
sel,  I  have  no  doubt,  hopes  the  shrewdness  of  this  argument  will  be  its 
apology  for  want  of  solidity.  The  master  never  had  a  single  just  right  to 
the  slave,  and  the  Constitution  no  more  preserves  any  for  him,  than  it  does 
the  turnpike  for  highwaymen,  the  treasure  in  my  house  for  a  thief,  or 
the  thoughtless  young  heir,  for  a  prey  to  black -legs  and  sharpers. 

MR.  S.  said,  after  this  view  of  this  question  had  been  taken,  he  should 
consider  the  concession  virtually  made,  that  slavery  was  repugnant  to  the 
new  Constitution ;  that  the  Massachusetts  decision  ended  this  cause,  if 
good  authority.  But  slavery  had  been  spoken  of  by  the  defendant's  coun 
sel  with  great  respect.  Said  MR.  S.,  I  regard  it  as  the  curse  of  the  Nation. 
Virginia,  at  the  time  of  the  first  census,  in  1790,  had  more  than  double 
the  inhabitants  of  the  State  of  New  York:  now  it  is  sadly  reversed,  New 
York  has  about  double  that  of  Virginia.  Virginia,  with  nearly  double  the 
territory  of  New  York,  and  more  good  land  than  New  York,  situated  in  the 
most  benignant  climate,  to  be  found  under  the  bright  Heavens,  penetrated 
4 


50 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 


with  large  bays,  and  beautiful,  noble,  and  navigable  rivers,  stretching  to  the 
metropolis  of  our  land,  washed  by  the  Ohio  ;  no  land  whose  mountains  are 
more  ready  to  burst  with  tlic'ir  mineral  wealth  than  her's ;  whose  lead,  iron, 
coal,  and  copper,  lie  hoarded  in  those  beautiful  mountains,  in  value  beyond 
the  computations  of  numbers,  or  the  dreams  of  avarice.  But  that  wealth 
shall  never  be  explored,  raised,  or  enjoyed  by  the  palsied  arm  of  slavery. 
No,  it  is  reserved  for  the  vigor  of  the  freeman's  strength ;  not  dishonored 
by  the  blight  of  unpaid  labor  :  those  treasures  will  only  come  at  the  call 
of  honored  and  free  labor. 

Look  at  hundreds  of  thousands  of  acres  of  fair  and  valuable  land  in 
Western  Virginia,  which  would  make  beautiful  farms,  when  free  labor 
shall  be  honored,  now  sold  at  six  cents,  ten  cents,  and  twenty-five  cents 
an  acre.  Look  at  hundreds  of  old  farms  within  forty  and  fifty  miles 
of  Washington,  to  be  sold  from  $4  to  $10  per  acre,  with  their  dilapi 
dated  buildings,  covered  with  mortgages  and  trust  deeds  ;  the  same 
land,  slavery  abolished,  and  freemen  to  cultivate,  would  be  worth  from 
$30  to  $80  per  acre.  Look  at  whole  regions  and  portions  of  counties 
abandoned,  as  commons,  in  old  Eastern  Virginia,  where  you  may  ride  for 
hours,  without  meeting  an  inhabitant  in  the  lower  counties  of  this  State, — 
land  yet  beautiful,  if  its  powers  of  fecundity  were  truly  developed  by  free 
men,  once  the  seats  of  joyful  hospitality  of  the  last  century,  now  as  silent 
as  the  ruins  of  Palmyra  and  Babylon.  The  young  growth  of  timber  com 
ing  up,  the  wild  animals  resuming  their  ancient  dominion,  the  traveller 
from  the  old  world,  as  he  measured  his  lonely  steps  over  these  forsaken 
abodes  of  men,  would  inquire  what  desolating  wars  have  consumed  the 
sons  and  daughters  of  this  fair  land  ?  in  what  Chronicles  shall  it  be  found, 
or  what  more  than  Egyptian  plague  has  been  and  bereaved  these  uncul 
tivated  lands  of  their  proprietors,  and  has  left  the  fox  to  come  in  at  the 
window,  and  the  owl  to  hoot  at  noon,  and  appointed  the  stork,  the  raven, 
the  cormorant  and  bittern,  to  perform  the  hospitalities  of  these  dilapidat 
ed  homes  of  departed  men  ?  Alas  !  the  curse  of  the  slave's  foot-print  has 
been  here,  unrewarded  toil  has  been  here,  inalienable  rights  have  been 
cloven  down  here,  man  has  ranked  with  the  ox,  in  the  market,  here;  mar 
riage-rights  were  trodden  under  foot  here ;  the  father  who  begot,  and  the 
.  mother  who  bore  the  son  and  the  daughter,  had  no  rights  in  their  child 
ren  here;  men  had  no  right  to  cultivate  their  immortal  minds  here;  justice 
and  mercy  had  no  abode  here;  free  labor  was  dishonored  here;  the  lash, 
the  fetter  and  the  chain,  ruled  here ;  and  at  last,  hunger  expelled  the  op 
pressor  from  his  home  here. 

Said  MR.  S.,  the  splendid  and  princely  plantation  of  George  Washing 
ton,  the  Father  of  his  country,  presents  in  forty-five  years  one  of  the  most 
melancholy  and  remarkable  instances  of  that  ceaseless  vigilance  of  Pro 
vidence  which  pursues  injustice  with  unerring  certainty,  from  year  to 
year,  and  at  last  overtakes  and  awards  the  punishment  affixed  to  funda 
mental  violations  of  the  great  rights,  which  the  Father  of  all  has  in  the 
welfare  of  his  abused  children. 

Thousands  of  acres,  and  money  in  vast  amount,  united  in  the  official 
station  of  President,  this  plantation  lying  within  some  ten  or  twelve 
miles  from  the  three  beautiful  cities  of  Georgetown,  Washington  and 
Alexandria,  partly  surrounded  by  the  majestic  Potomac  river,  bearing 
on  its  commercial  bosom  ships  from  the  ends  of  the  world,  freighted 
with  every  human  want,  this  plantation  was  ready  to  ship  at  its  own 
door,  every  redundancy  it  bore  at  remunerating  prices.  The  ambition  of 
General  Washington  during  the  last  years  of  his  retirement  was  to  make 
this  favored  place,  with  his  hundred  slaves,  his  abounding  wealth,  the 
great  pattern  plantation  of  this  continent.  Having  done  much  to  see  his 
high  purpose  accomplished,  in  December,  1799,  he  died,  having  emanci 
pated  his  slaves  by  his  will.  Judge  Bushrod  Washington,  his  nephew, 


SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY.  51 

with  a  large  family  of  slaves,  with  a  salary  of  $4500  from  the  United 
States  as  Judge  for  life,  succeeded  his  illustrious  uncle;  and  in  1819  or 
thereabouts,  made  a  large  sale  of  some  thirty  to  fifty  slaves,  being  near 
one-half.  The  nation  was  incensed  at  the  act ;  his  public  apology  was, 
that  he  was  compelled  to  sell  part  to  support  the  rest,  and  thus  the  pro 
cess  of  anthropophagi,  or  man  eating  man,  indirectly  commenced ;  the  cul 
tivation  was  miserable  and  the  bushes  encroached;  some  fields  by  1828 
or  1829  at  the  time  of  the  Judge's  death  began  to  be  given  up.  John  A. 
Washington,  the  nephew  of  the  Judge,  succeeds,  the  woods  still  gained, 
field  after  field,  under  slave  and  master's  cultivation,  went  back  to  pri 
meval  forest.  And  about  1839  or  '40  Colonel  Washington  died,  and  in 
the  month  of  April  or  May,  1842,  the  widow  and  her  children  were  like 
Adam  and  Eve  from  Paradise  driven  out.  "  Great  Burnam  Wood  had 
come  to  Dunsinane"  as  in  Macbeth;  the  door  was  locked,  the  gate  was 
shut,  slavery's  curse  and  the  wilderness  had  expelled  them  from  this 
ancient  home  of  America's  great  man.  This  is  slavery,  sooner  or  later, 
everywhere  ;  the  curse  of  Heaven  is  upon  it. 

MR.  S.  said,  it  would  be  a  fraud  on  the  people  of  New  Jersey,  so  to 
construe  their  new  Constitution,  as  the  defendant's  counsel  had  contended. 
There  was  not  one  in  fifteen  of  the  seventy-thousand  who  voted  for 
its  adoption,  who  would  not  glory  and  feel  elevated  by  the  act.  To  see 
these  poor  bondmen  and  their  children  free,  must  be  matter  of  joy  to  all. 
The  argument  they  would  not  be  so  well  off,  is  too  stale  to  be  used  in 
1845  in  New  Jersey.  For  if  the  argument  proves  anything  it  proves  too 
much,  and  that  it  would  be  better  for  the  great  mass  of  mankind  to  be 
slaves,  and  that  it  is  a  desirable  institution.  On  that  point  I  have  no 
more  to  say  except  that  those  who  believe  such  doctrines  caji  easily  put 
themselves  and  families  in  possession  of  its  blessings,  as  several  of  the 
slave  States  are  so  kind  as  not  to  refuse  to  those  of  Anglo-Saxon  descent 
the  peculiar  privileges  of  that  pleasant-spoken  institution. 

To  illustrate  one  of  the  abhorrent  features  of  the  institution  in  the  slave 
States,  MR.  STEWART,  adverting  to  one  of  the  positions  of  the  opposite 
counsel,  supposed  the  following  case.  An  old  man,  said  he,  whom  we 
will  call  Tinkem,  lived  in  Trenton,  once  upon  a  time,  and  not  being  long  for 
this  world,  called  his  ten  sons  around  him  and  told  them,  My  sons,  I  have 
but  little  to  give  you  of  worldly  property,  and,  therefore,  in  order  to  start  the 
five  oldest  of  you  comfortably  in  this  life,  I  give  each  of  them  one  of 
their  five  younger  brothers,  to  be  his  property, — in  other  words,  his  slave 
for  life,  and  his  posterity  after  him.  And  you,  the  five  youngest  of  my 
sons,  must  be  the  slaves  of  your  elder  brothers.  I  do  this  in  conformity 
with  the  usage  of  the  citizens  of  a  large  number  of  the  States  of  thi's 
Union  !  But  the  eldest  son  says,  "  Father,  what  are  the  rights  and  prero 
gatives  which  we  shall,  in  that  case,  possess  over  our  our  slave  brothers  ?" 

"  Oh,"  said  the  old  man,  "  you  will  reduce  them  to  chattels,  or  cattle, — 
living,  breathing  property, — that  is  all.  It  is  perfectly  legal,  and  you  will 
be  protected  in  the  enjoyment  of  your  property;  you  are  no  longer  to 
regard  them  as  sentient  beings;  you  are  to  deprive  them  of  all  education, 
except  the  cart-whip  instruction  ;  you  are  to  make  them  know  and  feel 
that  their  every  moment  is  to  be  regulated  by  your  wish  and  will,  and 
that  they  are  subject  to  be  sold,  and  worked,  husband  apart  from  wife, 
and  wife  from  husband ;  and  their  children  from  both.  So,  now,  my 
sons,  take  your  slaves,  and  begone!"  Now  (continued  MR.  STEWART), 
the  story  of  this  horrible  deed  reached  the  ears  of  the  citizens  of  Trenton, 
and  the  sanctums  of  its  editors.  A  burst  of  indignation  is  the  consequence. 
Everybody  and  every  press  exclaims  "  monster !  monster  !  monster !" 
with  one  voice.  It  is  taken  up  by  the  people,  and  the  press  of  Phila 
delphia  and  New  York,  and  language  grows  weak,  and  imagination 
weary,  in  searching  for  fitting  epithets  in  which  to  condemn  the  foul  and 


OZ  SLAVERY    IN    NEW    JERSEY. 

damning  act  of  this  heartless  old  villain,  Tink'em  of  Trenton !  Men  come 
from  a  prodigious  distance  to  get  a  sight  of  so  much  moral  deformity, 
existing  in  a  single  man.  The  phrenologists  come  to  examine  his  cranio- 
logical  developments,  wondering  what  manner  of  man-rnonster  he  can 
be :  and  the  whole  nation  rings  with  the  story,  and  but  one  opinion  is 
expressed,  everywhere,  in  public  and  in  private, — and  that  of  horror 
and  astonishment.  But,  your  honors,  pause  in  your  honest  outburst  of 
indignation.  Old  Tinkem  stands  excused,  in  view  of  the  fact  that  not  a 
week  comes  and  goes  in  the  regions  of  the  sunny  south,  that  does  not 
furnish  a  parallel  to  his  conduct.  A  slaveholding  father  there  gives  the 
children  of  his  own  body,  by  his  bond-woman,  to  be  slaves  for  life,  to 
his  children  by  his  free-woman, — I  mean,  his  wife  !  Ic  is  done  in  twelve 
States  out  of  the  seven  and  twenty  of  which  this  Union  is  composed, 
whenever  the  father  \vishes  to  endow  his  heir  out  of  his  possessions. 
And  this  I  hold  to  be  slavery  in  the  length  and  breadth  of  its  fiagitiousness ; 
it  is  yet  but  one  phase  of  its  abounding  villany.  The  picture  is  startling, 
frightful,  revolting ;  but  it  is  neither  overdrawn,  nor  too  highly  colored. 

MR.  S.  replied  to  several  subordinate  points  made,  and  authorities 
cited  by  the  counsel  of  the  defendants,  which  it  is  not  supposed  would 
materially  improve  the  report  of  the  argument.  What  is  further  said  is 
a  part  of  a  report  made  of  what  MR.  S.  said,  by  Mr.  Otis,  reporter  of  the 
New  York  Evening  Express,  and  what  followed  MR.  STEWART'S  close  is 
the  report  of  Mr.  Otis  also. 

MR.  STEWART  drew  his  remarks  to  a  close  by  appealing  to  the  Court 
very  earnestly  as  to  the  high  and  solemn  duty  left  to  them  to  perform. 
It  is  yours,  may  it  please  your  honors  (he  said),  to  put  the  last,  the  finish 
ing  stroke  upon  slavery,  in  one  of  the  noblest  old  States  of  this  glorious 
confederation.  It  is  an  honor  which  you  should  covet.  Let  no  man 
take  it  from  you.  Leave  it  not  to  other  hands  to  finish  so  noble  a 
work.  What  would  the  world  say,  to  see  a  case  like  this,  argued  as  it 
has  been  before  this  Court  for  two  days,  with  the  full  light  of  this  blessed 
and  glorious  Constitution  shedding  its  rays  upon  it,  turned  off  and  decided 
against  liberty,  upon  the  worse  than  doubtful  authority  of  a  few  extinct 
and  exploded  statutes,  which  stand  repealed  in  your  code  by  the  voice 
of  the  people  speaking  through  a  Convention  of  their  choice, — the  acts 
of  which  they  have  also  confirmed  by  their  solemn  votes  ?  May  it  please 
your  honors,  I  cannot  believe  that  such  will  be  your  decision.  I  have 
too  much  faith  in  my  kind  for  this.  I  feel  that  New  Jersey  will  hold  up 
the  hands  of  this  Court  in  coming  to  the  support  of  freedom  and  of  free 
institutions  in  her  borders. 

Never  can  the  act  be  regretted.  Conscience  will  approve  it.  Time 
will  approve  it.  Death-bed  reflection  will  approve  it.  Eternity  and 
heaven  will  approve  it.  It  has  been  long,  too  long  postponed.  But  it  is 
not  too  late  to  come  up,  manlike,  statesmanlike,  patriotlike,  godlike,  and 
declare  that  it  is  indeed  true,  in  the  language  of  your  now  organic  law, 
that  within  all  your  pleasant  borders,  at  least,  all  mankind  are,  by  nature, 
entitled  to  perfect  freedom  in  the  possession  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pur 
suit  of  happiness ! 

After  MR.  STEWART  resumed  his  seat,  there  was  a  pause  of  some  dura 
tion.  The  scene  was  quite  impressive.  The  auditory  was  numerous 
and  highly  respectable,  and  suc-h  was  the  impressiveness  with  which  the 
closing  appeal  of  the  advocate  for  freedom  was  delivered,  that  no  one 
seemed  to  like  to  be  the  first  to  break  the  spell  his  eloquence  had  cast 
upon  the  assembly.  At  length,  the  Bench  arose,  the  Chief  Justice  adjourned 
the  Court  until  to-morrow  morning,  and  the  hearing  of  the  cases  which 
have  occupied  our  attention  for  these  two  days  past  was  terminated. 

The  decisions  therein  will  probably  be  given  some  time  during  the  next 

term  of  the  Court.  / 

••.- 


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